Open early, open often is the mantra of open source, remember?
The full quote is "Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.", it's directed at getting code out there in the open rather than waiting until it is perfect before letting anybody see it. It doesn't mean that you should label anything you can compile as a stable release, just that you shouldn't do all your work behind closed doors until it's perfect. Not to mention the fact that the advice was garnered from the Linux kernel, something significantly smaller than KDE and not anywhere near as directly exposed to end-users. And if that advice is so useful, how come the KDE project doesn't follow two-thirds of it? They have very long release cycles, ignored anybody who told them that it wasn't ready to be called 4.0 and told anybody asking where the missing features were to wait until 4.1.
KDE is THE desktop environment for Linux newbies.
I'm a KDE user myself, but I would not go so far as to say that. KDE is for power users, and almost all the distributions default to GNOME, which is quite a bit simpler.
Or do you want them to follow enlightenment release cycle instead?
The problem is that they are too much like the enlightenment release cycle. KDE tried to do too much in one go. I remember when KDE 4 was supposed to be a short release cycle that was nothing but a straight port to Qt 4. Somehow they decided to totally rewrite everything important and invent major new subsystems that everything critical is based upon — while porting to Qt 4 at the same time! There is simply no way a step that large is compatible with "Release often" or "Listen to your customers", because it's an incredible amount of work just to remain where you are.
There's a noticeable lack of authorship details. It notes that various government departments have "contributed to" the options analysis, but I read that as simply saying that people from those departments have been interviewed in the course of performing this analysis.
Does anybody know who actually produced this report? I'd hardly call the government a bunch of liars for opinions expressed in a report produced by outside contractors, but without any reason to believe otherwise, that's what this sounds like to me.
It's been a lot longer than two years. For example, see this thread from eight years ago:
The new release schedule provides for a 1.7
release later in 2000 (or early 2001); after that,
we'll be working on "Python 3000" (the new code
name for the grand Python redesign; the language
will be incompatible).
And from a reply:
(personally, I'd be very surprised if the changes were
such that old code couldn't be automatically translated).
Actually, the migration tool 2to3 performs this change automatically, and the function call approach works in both 2.5 and 3.0, so the incompatibility is greatly exaggerated.
The vast majority of the language and standard library will remain the same. This is just about tidying up some unfortunate warts that affect a lot of people, such as unifying the different string types. It remains Python in practically every way, and renaming it is simply unnecessary.
This has been known for donkey's years. Guido has been talking about this compatibility break since the 90s. The changes were laid out in detail in PEP 3000, first published in 2006. They have already released two alphas. A conversion tool to automatically make some of the required changes (such as changing print statements to print() function calls) already exists.
just because something has a technical definition doesn't mean it can't a completely different meaning when used in a legal context.
Sure, but if the word is being used with a different meaning to how it is commonly used, then the law has to define that meaning. Does this law do that?
Also, I don't speak Italian, but as far as English is concerned, it's not merely a "technical" definition, the common meaning of the word "degraded" applies to the MP3 encoding process. The mistake, if any, isn't that the word was used incorrectly, it's that they didn't define the level of degradation necessary.
My point is simply that a browser can get 80% or more of the market without being bundled with an OS.
And b.emile's point was that this has only ever been demonstrated when the dominant operating system didn't have a browser bundled with it. The historical fact you point out is irrelevant because of this. You are excusing bundling because the desired outcome was possible before bundling was put into practice — you are begging the question.
There's no guarantee that IE usage will drop to a minority share just because it becomes unbundled from Windows.
It's not about making Internet Explorer drop to a minority share, it's about making browsers compete based on their value rather than whether the dominant desktop OS vendor makes them.
There is some harm to the browser market due to IE being bundled with Windows.
That is the basis of Opera's claim. If you can accept that is true in spite of this article, then you cannot believe the article undermines Opera's case. They are mutually exclusive opinions.
how does Opera expect its consumers to download and install Opera without a web browser?
Quite apart from the OEM example already provided, just because you think it's necessary to have some easy way of installing other browsers, it doesn't follow that Microsoft should have bundled a full-fledged web browser. There was nothing stopping Microsoft from bundling a bare-bones browser intended only as a last resort. They did that with their FTP and telnet clients.
You don't need half the features present in Internet Explorer to download and install a proper browser. Favourites, ActiveX, JavaScript, VBScript, Flash, tabs, history, there are plenty of features that are in Internet Explorer that just aren't necessary for the requirement you lay out. Microsoft could have provided an even playing field by bundling a bare-bones browser like that built-in, and offering Internet Explorer as an optional download, just like all other browsers.
I guess users will go out of their way to download other browsers, after all. That undermines Opera's case.
No it doesn't. Just because it's obvious that Microsoft hasn't totally eradicated all competition, it doesn't mean that the market hasn't been harmed or that Opera hasn't had an undue burden placed upon it via illegal practices.
To draw an analogy, this is like arguing that the fact somebody can still walk means that they haven't been assaulted. Just because you can show that the harm hasn't gone to extremes, it doesn't mean the harm doesn't exist at all.
Let's for a second assume that Limewire, et al were "illegal download services", how does that reflect negatively on Radiohead's distribution strategy?
It comes from the very heart of the matter — whether you think copyright is a device to enable artists to make a living from their creativity so that they produce more stuff, or whether you think copyright is a property right.
If you think the former is true, then you look at the millions that Radiohead made, and you consider it a success. They don't have to worry about a day job, they can concentrate on making music.
If the think the latter is true, it doesn't matter how much money they made, all the unauthorised downloads are losses and you have been stolen from. If you were giving it away yourself, that only makes it worse because, in his eyes, there was no reason to steal and they did it anyway.
I think the latter attitude is totally unsupportable in every way, but it's the mindset of a lot of people in the music industry, and this is where some of their most ridiculous statements are rooted. I think it's less about greed and more about the inability to comprehend the economics of zero scarcity — they can't reason about it, they have to resort to analogies with things they can reason about — physical objects. But of course, physical objects aren't subject to the same limitations information is, so the analogy breaks down and they come to unsupportable conclusions.
1709. The first real copyright law was the Statute of Anne, which protected copyright for 14 years, with pre-existing works grandfathered in with a term length of 21 years.
Considering it's easier to make a living these days and easier to copy and distribute original content, the term lengths should have been shortened instead of lengthened.
So if normal phones are used for this, what's stopping terrorists from decoding the signal they send and putting timed devices in bins all the way down a street? Set them off, watch the response teams flock to that location, and then attack on the other side of the city.
Isn't there a security law that states something along the lines of "always consider how a security measure can be abused"?
MS required a bigger change to websites earlier, when they deliberately broke IE6 as a result of the Eolas dispute. If they can break their browser to get around patent disputes, but not to comply with standards, it just shows where their priorities are.
In the face of half a billion dollars in damages awarded by the court! How many people here have criticised Microsoft for ignoring court decisions? But when they actually respond to a court case, suddenly it's evidence that they don't want to follow standards? Get some perspective. When they settled the case and obtained a license, they put Internet Explorer back to how it was before too. Hardly the flagrant, unnecessary incompatibility you make it out to be.
The idea is that MS would test their engine before shipping.
When you have to be compatible with an entire world-wide web's worth of documents and applications, it's impossible for any organisation, even Microsoft, to test adequately. New rendering engines break things, even a theoretical perfect rendering engine would bring to light ambiguities in the specifications. "Microsoft should just test it" is not a feasible approach.
"Things" as you so eloquently wrote are already broken.
Not as far as users are concerned. As far as developers are concerned, sure, but we're talking about users here. If they visit a website and it works, then upgrade to a new version of Internet Explorer and it breaks, then Microsoft is responsible as far as the user is concerned.
The users will adapt.
Advocating forcing users to just deal with it shows you are focused on the developers and not the users, the exact thing you are accusing Microsoft of doing.
Actually I do mean "tag" as in an instance of the "meta" element type. Trust me, I understand the concept
A tag is not an instance of an element type. An element is an instance of an element type. A tag is a syntactic delimiter, marking a boundary of an element.
I want to follow published vetted and agreed-upon standards.
There is nothing in this mechanism preventing you from doing that.
Don't start down this path of "it's been in the spec since [whenever]" because you'll find Microsoft hasn't really played that game.
You claimed that Microsoft invented a non-standard tag. The simple fact of the matter is that they have done no such thing in this case. Complaining that Microsoft ignores specifications doesn't change the fact that your accusation was false.
It should be VERY trivial to add the one line of MS-HTML to these sites for you.
So does he do this work for the 20 organisations for free, or do they pay him? Do they have to find out when people start telling them their websites don't work, or should he spend time testing every site he's ever designed? What if he's moved on and isn't available to hire any more?
In essence, what you are saying is that Microsoft should break sites for a lot of organisations that don't have much money, and when they find out, they'll have to hire a consultant to figure out what's wrong and fix it. This is not a trivial thing to many people, "oh it's jut a line of code" doesn't cut it when you are breaking existing code all over the world.
Inserting a one-line meta-tag is so trivial, that any website that's actually being maintained can do it with no trouble at all.
The problem is that a great many websites aren't maintained.
It also means that in 5-10 years, that meta tag will gracefully die out, as nobody will need the backwards compatibility code.
There's nothing stopping them from making that the default for Internet Explorer 9. But this is a major new rendering engine, switching to it by default when it is totally unproven is a really bad idea.
If they'd just use conditional comments then as IE6 and IE7 get phased out we'd all be able to just do plain old HTML with NO nonstandard tags
You have it backwards. Conditional comments use non-standard syntax. This new <meta> element approach uses the standard HTML and HTTP methods of providing metadata.
My solution would be to screw "backwards compatibility."
So in other words, you don't have a solution that can satisfy both constraints at once and would rather drop one of the constraints? You have the right to that opinion, but that doesn't mean you think that this particular mechanism is wrong, it means you think that their overall strategy is wrong.
At some point we have to decide to abandon the old busted crap and move forward.
I completely agree. But you are advocating doing that without any transition period where both rendering engines are available. I don't think that's at all sensible.
really, at some point backwards compatibility should be sacrificed in favor of progress. Most others do this in some fashion. We even have a word for it: deprecation.
Name one browser that has removed support for the <font> element type, which was deprecated over a decade ago. Or look at how many browsers use doctype switching to retain backwards compatibility.
Slashdot Mirror
The full quote is "Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.", it's directed at getting code out there in the open rather than waiting until it is perfect before letting anybody see it. It doesn't mean that you should label anything you can compile as a stable release, just that you shouldn't do all your work behind closed doors until it's perfect. Not to mention the fact that the advice was garnered from the Linux kernel, something significantly smaller than KDE and not anywhere near as directly exposed to end-users. And if that advice is so useful, how come the KDE project doesn't follow two-thirds of it? They have very long release cycles, ignored anybody who told them that it wasn't ready to be called 4.0 and told anybody asking where the missing features were to wait until 4.1.
I'm a KDE user myself, but I would not go so far as to say that. KDE is for power users, and almost all the distributions default to GNOME, which is quite a bit simpler.
The problem is that they are too much like the enlightenment release cycle. KDE tried to do too much in one go. I remember when KDE 4 was supposed to be a short release cycle that was nothing but a straight port to Qt 4. Somehow they decided to totally rewrite everything important and invent major new subsystems that everything critical is based upon — while porting to Qt 4 at the same time! There is simply no way a step that large is compatible with "Release often" or "Listen to your customers", because it's an incredible amount of work just to remain where you are.
I take it back, the IPS are responsible for this, I just didn't spot it because it was written in the third-person.
There's a noticeable lack of authorship details. It notes that various government departments have "contributed to" the options analysis, but I read that as simply saying that people from those departments have been interviewed in the course of performing this analysis.
Does anybody know who actually produced this report? I'd hardly call the government a bunch of liars for opinions expressed in a report produced by outside contractors, but without any reason to believe otherwise, that's what this sounds like to me.
No, "donkey's" is just an abbreviated form of the phrase "donkey's years". More information on phrases.org.uk.
You are correct, but the common case of printing one value is identical. Read PEP 3105 for the details.
It's been a lot longer than two years. For example, see this thread from eight years ago:
And from a reply:
Actually, the migration tool 2to3 performs this change automatically, and the function call approach works in both 2.5 and 3.0, so the incompatibility is greatly exaggerated.
The vast majority of the language and standard library will remain the same. This is just about tidying up some unfortunate warts that affect a lot of people, such as unifying the different string types. It remains Python in practically every way, and renaming it is simply unnecessary.
This has been known for donkey's years. Guido has been talking about this compatibility break since the 90s. The changes were laid out in detail in PEP 3000, first published in 2006. They have already released two alphas. A conversion tool to automatically make some of the required changes (such as changing print statements to print() function calls) already exists.
Sure, but if the word is being used with a different meaning to how it is commonly used, then the law has to define that meaning. Does this law do that?
Also, I don't speak Italian, but as far as English is concerned, it's not merely a "technical" definition, the common meaning of the word "degraded" applies to the MP3 encoding process. The mistake, if any, isn't that the word was used incorrectly, it's that they didn't define the level of degradation necessary.
And b.emile's point was that this has only ever been demonstrated when the dominant operating system didn't have a browser bundled with it. The historical fact you point out is irrelevant because of this. You are excusing bundling because the desired outcome was possible before bundling was put into practice — you are begging the question.
It's not about making Internet Explorer drop to a minority share, it's about making browsers compete based on their value rather than whether the dominant desktop OS vendor makes them.
That is the basis of Opera's claim. If you can accept that is true in spite of this article, then you cannot believe the article undermines Opera's case. They are mutually exclusive opinions.
Quite apart from the OEM example already provided, just because you think it's necessary to have some easy way of installing other browsers, it doesn't follow that Microsoft should have bundled a full-fledged web browser. There was nothing stopping Microsoft from bundling a bare-bones browser intended only as a last resort. They did that with their FTP and telnet clients.
You don't need half the features present in Internet Explorer to download and install a proper browser. Favourites, ActiveX, JavaScript, VBScript, Flash, tabs, history, there are plenty of features that are in Internet Explorer that just aren't necessary for the requirement you lay out. Microsoft could have provided an even playing field by bundling a bare-bones browser like that built-in, and offering Internet Explorer as an optional download, just like all other browsers.
No it doesn't. Just because it's obvious that Microsoft hasn't totally eradicated all competition, it doesn't mean that the market hasn't been harmed or that Opera hasn't had an undue burden placed upon it via illegal practices.
To draw an analogy, this is like arguing that the fact somebody can still walk means that they haven't been assaulted. Just because you can show that the harm hasn't gone to extremes, it doesn't mean the harm doesn't exist at all.
Whoops, that's the inverse of what I meant to say; information isn't subject to the same limitations that physical objects are.
It comes from the very heart of the matter — whether you think copyright is a device to enable artists to make a living from their creativity so that they produce more stuff, or whether you think copyright is a property right.
If you think the former is true, then you look at the millions that Radiohead made, and you consider it a success. They don't have to worry about a day job, they can concentrate on making music.
If the think the latter is true, it doesn't matter how much money they made, all the unauthorised downloads are losses and you have been stolen from. If you were giving it away yourself, that only makes it worse because, in his eyes, there was no reason to steal and they did it anyway.
I think the latter attitude is totally unsupportable in every way, but it's the mindset of a lot of people in the music industry, and this is where some of their most ridiculous statements are rooted. I think it's less about greed and more about the inability to comprehend the economics of zero scarcity — they can't reason about it, they have to resort to analogies with things they can reason about — physical objects. But of course, physical objects aren't subject to the same limitations information is, so the analogy breaks down and they come to unsupportable conclusions.
1709. The first real copyright law was the Statute of Anne, which protected copyright for 14 years, with pre-existing works grandfathered in with a term length of 21 years.
Considering it's easier to make a living these days and easier to copy and distribute original content, the term lengths should have been shortened instead of lengthened.
So if normal phones are used for this, what's stopping terrorists from decoding the signal they send and putting timed devices in bins all the way down a street? Set them off, watch the response teams flock to that location, and then attack on the other side of the city.
Isn't there a security law that states something along the lines of "always consider how a security measure can be abused"?
That approach only satisfies one of the constraints. "It breaks until you hire somebody to fix it" is not backwards compatibility.
In the face of half a billion dollars in damages awarded by the court! How many people here have criticised Microsoft for ignoring court decisions? But when they actually respond to a court case, suddenly it's evidence that they don't want to follow standards? Get some perspective. When they settled the case and obtained a license, they put Internet Explorer back to how it was before too. Hardly the flagrant, unnecessary incompatibility you make it out to be.
When you have to be compatible with an entire world-wide web's worth of documents and applications, it's impossible for any organisation, even Microsoft, to test adequately. New rendering engines break things, even a theoretical perfect rendering engine would bring to light ambiguities in the specifications. "Microsoft should just test it" is not a feasible approach.
Not as far as users are concerned. As far as developers are concerned, sure, but we're talking about users here. If they visit a website and it works, then upgrade to a new version of Internet Explorer and it breaks, then Microsoft is responsible as far as the user is concerned.
Advocating forcing users to just deal with it shows you are focused on the developers and not the users, the exact thing you are accusing Microsoft of doing.
A tag is not an instance of an element type. An element is an instance of an element type. A tag is a syntactic delimiter, marking a boundary of an element.
There is nothing in this mechanism preventing you from doing that.
You claimed that Microsoft invented a non-standard tag. The simple fact of the matter is that they have done no such thing in this case. Complaining that Microsoft ignores specifications doesn't change the fact that your accusation was false.
So does he do this work for the 20 organisations for free, or do they pay him? Do they have to find out when people start telling them their websites don't work, or should he spend time testing every site he's ever designed? What if he's moved on and isn't available to hire any more?
In essence, what you are saying is that Microsoft should break sites for a lot of organisations that don't have much money, and when they find out, they'll have to hire a consultant to figure out what's wrong and fix it. This is not a trivial thing to many people, "oh it's jut a line of code" doesn't cut it when you are breaking existing code all over the world.
The problem is that a great many websites aren't maintained.
There's nothing stopping them from making that the default for Internet Explorer 9. But this is a major new rendering engine, switching to it by default when it is totally unproven is a really bad idea.
You have it backwards. Conditional comments use non-standard syntax. This new <meta> element approach uses the standard HTML and HTTP methods of providing metadata.
So in other words, you don't have a solution that can satisfy both constraints at once and would rather drop one of the constraints? You have the right to that opinion, but that doesn't mean you think that this particular mechanism is wrong, it means you think that their overall strategy is wrong.
I completely agree. But you are advocating doing that without any transition period where both rendering engines are available. I don't think that's at all sensible.
Name one browser that has removed support for the <font> element type, which was deprecated over a decade ago. Or look at how many browsers use doctype switching to retain backwards compatibility.