The problem with alternate versions is cost. You're required to maintain a separate codebase for your slimmed down version, and you need to have enough potential earnings for that codebase for it to become feasible. Unless a considerable chunk of your clients for the regular version demand a trimmed down version or they will move to a competitor, there is no business case for supporting alternate platforms right now, due to low usage numbers.
First, if you actually wrote a proper website in the first place, you do NOT need to create or maintain two versions. This is a myth perpetrated by incompetent self-styled "designers" that never bothered to learn to understand the media they're working in.
If you made a godawful pile of crud instead of a webpage, then you shouldn't make a new, good version and maintain them both, you should make a new, good version and delete the crud.
So for people that have proper websites, the costs involved are very close to nonexistent. And those that don't, should really get one anyway, mobile phones or no mobile phones. So this is all a red herring.
There is definately a business case for making your site as accessible and useful as possible for as many of your customers as possible. There's also a great business case for supporting early adopters. If you're the first, it's a great strategic move. If you're not the first, you'll wind up following a little later, and not having as good a position. The business case is there. The fact that it involves old fashioned capitalist principle of offering value to the consumer instead of conforming to the Enron philosophy of grab the money and run prevelant with management folks in the US these days doesn't mean it doesn't make business sense - just that the US corporate management culture isn't particularly agile or smart.
You're quite correct that, all other things being equal, it's an advantage to have shiny-pretty. But the notion that you have to choose between pretty on the one hand and correct and accessible on the other. That's simply not true. And a website that has functionality problems, that relies on things like flash (you CAN use flash without relying on it, it's not very difficult, but using it improperly without providing for graceful degredation is what I'm talking about here) or is simply very poorly written, no matter how pretty it may appear when first loaded up in the most popular browser, isn't going to do the company behind it any favours in the long run.
What Tim Berners-Lee is doing saying things like "Everyone was supposed to be browsing the Web with their mobile phone, but the problem is that it has not happened" is beyond me; the guy seems to have lost the plot. When he originally came up with the idea of the web, I *bet* he didn't envision people surfing it on a mobile phone
Sounds to me like you're the one that lost the plot - or never had it.
Lee designed the web explicitly, from the beginning, to wrap content inside logical tags so as to enable an infinite variety of devices, with very different properties and different media, to parse and present that content properly for the particular environment.
He may or may not have anticipated mobile phone technology expliclitly, but when the man designed the web so that browsers with capablities reaching from small text-only displays to the largest CRTs and even by browsers with no screen at all (such as blind people use, for instance) could all have easy access to the same data, formatted however is appropriate for each end users individual "display environment" - he's being quite consistent.
I have it from several sources that the source license was common with business customers, and not difficult for any customer to obtain generally. I wish I could remember the name of the book, I know I read that someone that worked at MS in the early days mentioned that they had it.
As to the demonstration and easter egg, yes, I believe the only credible sources specify a very early version of DOS. But assuming that the story is essentially true, it would mean for sure that there was some copyright infringement from CP/M source code, something which both Patterson and Microsoft probably had both motive and opportunity to do.
Funny he would bring this up now though...
Well, here's the thing. CP/M licensees got source code. Microsoft had it. Patterson had it. Then years later IIRC, Killdall stood up in court and entered a keystrokes at a PC running MSDOS and brought up an easter egg he had programmed into CP/M years earlier, proving they had used his code.
As a result, he wound up getting lots of money and use of the MSDOS codebase to keep DR DOS compatible.
Patterson seems like the most likely source for the copying, but I've never seen that proven or any proof attempted.
From a legal perspective, there's no relevance to how much senders pay. The free speech rights of junk mailers has nothing to do with their subsidizing the USPS.
Get this through your head. Free speech rights don't compel others to PAY for a media for you to speak on. It does not provide a cover for theft or trespass.
What we want is a "email that pisses me off is bad" law and that's a real slippery slope.
No, we want a theft of services is bad law, and that's not a slippery slope at all. Unsolicited bulk email is the problem. Your clueless ****wit presumably is not asking for help with bulk mailings, so he's fine. The guy that wants to send yo ua pleby is fine too - unless he's got a big list of folks he's offering it to all at once. Commercial speech is fine. Bulk email, for that matter, is fine - as long as it's explicitly solicited.
Sure, but it also isn't inevitable with spam, so what's your point?
But it IS, in fact, inevitable with spam. Anyone with the slightest experience dealing with spam knows that. It's theoretically possible for a spammer to operate without stealing services, but it's not as a practical matter. In order to do that they would have to confine themselves to spamming on spam-friendly networks, which would mean spamming almost no one but each other. No spammer has ever been satisfied with that.
Recall the Supreme Court's ruling in Bolger v. Youngs Drug Products, 463 U.S. 60 (1983), where they upheld the right of junk mailers to send junk mail,
And as you damn well know the vast majority of the cost involved there is paid by the junk mailer. Materials, design, printing, postage... and they pay high postage, in effect subsidising the entire postal system. For this they get delivery.
Email spammers often pay nothing whatsoever to send, and never pay any significant fraction of the total transmission cost in any event. Very different situations.
The email system was designed for and implemented in nearly every installation for one on one or small-group conversations between people who are acquainted or have business together. Sending millions of emails to random addresses can never be anything but an assault on the email system - an act of trespass, theft, and vandalism, not of communication.
Free speech does not and has never given you the right to come spray paint your message on my house, and the invention of the net shouldn't change that.
When I was a kid people used to record tapes off the radio. Is that legal?
Short answer - no.
Short and wrong. Recording radio broadcasts, even making your own mix tapes with them as long as you don't use those for commercial purposes, is and has always been legal. The record companies never really opposed that as far as I know. Broadcast radio tends to be their conscious tool, and the quality is low and gets lower with remixing - unlike digital media - all of which made the tape recorder much less threatening technology in the view of the record companies in its day than digital recordings are seen by them now.
Does this mean the "make configure" checks will be shorter, because stuff if standardized? Or where will this be visible for end-users?
No, the whole LSB thing is pretty well irrelevant to software. It's about binary package compatibility, and only really interesting or useful for people that want to try and sell linux binaries instead. Which is one of the reasons you'll find lots of important people (Volkerding comes to mind) either apathetic or openly contemptuous of the thing, while the support for it comes mostly from folks like RedHat and Suse/Novell that are in the business of supporting their distro as a platform for things like, for example, Oracle, that are not and likely never will be available any other way.
Back in the mid 90s, I did that. Hit a great many remove-me links. Spam did drop for a short period of time, but within a few months it was back with a vengeance. That address is now completely unusable, I get about 5 spams an hour on it, and have long since given up on actually being able to use it.
What happened, I think, is that the spammers in many cases did remove me from their own mailing list - while simultaneously adding me to the 'confirmed good' list they sold to other spammers.
I agree with what you're saying, but strictly on word-usage letter I've got to crucify you. 'Software' is source code, pure and simple. Yes, the folks that want you to think software means 'licensed' binaries have tons of marketing muscle and common usage reflects that, but if we concede these sorts of battles we lose the war. Software is soft, not hard, because it's easily modified. Binaries are not easily modifiable, therefore they're clearly not software, I would call it 'firmware' but that word is understood to have a slightly different meaning. At any rate, whatever you want to call it, if it isn't source, it's not software.
Why couldn't the formation of speech be considered partially as a motor skill? Naturally, putting our thought processes into language isn't a fine motor skill, but why wouldn't using the tongue, the muscles around the mouth, larynx and trachea, as well as the diaphragm to create a variety of sound be considered fine muscle control, thus placing it in the motor skill department?
Clearly any language expression, any expression at all, requires some motor-control involvement.
Does the same part of the brain commit to processing spoken input, or does it only fire when speaking, writing or typing, ie creating output, which also requires motor control?
IIRC, areas such as Brocas, and the 'mirror neurons' in particular, are active in humans both when thinking quietly and when listening to someone else speak, as well as when reading.
Only partially. Studies have shown that it is clearly inborn. However, environment can reshape it to a degree. Many lefties are taught to shoot and write as if they were righties, for instance - but they still tend toward the left in areas where it wasn't trained out of them. And righties, even with plenty of motivation and training, have a very hard time simulating a left. Ask any right-handed boxer.
Some things (eating, writing, painting) I do with my left hand. Other things (batting, throwing, shooting) I do with my right hand. A few things I can do with either hand (using hand tools comes to mind). So, am I left-handed, right-handed, ambidextrious, or what?
This is fairly common actually. I think handedness is not so much a binary thing, as a continuum, although it's usually pretty heavily slanted to the right (but 'lefties' are often closer to ambidextrous.) At any rate, shooting is something where most lefties learn to go righty, as most firearms are right-handed, and left-handed models are rare and more expensive. Probably the best single test is which hand you catch something in, if it's thrown at you by surprise so you don't have time to think. My guess is that most researchers would classify you as a nearly ambidextrous lefty, but it's just a guess.
Also, adverts can be fully HTML/CSS compliant and still render differently on IE and Firefox due to different default behaviour that is not covered by HTML/CSS validators.
Yes, this is the intent. HTML does not, has never, and G-d willing will never specify how to render anything. It's not a layout language, it's a logical language. This is why it's so nice. So-called "web designers" that don't like this fact should find another medium more to their taste, and good riddance.
Being that this is related to my work, and I've been following the debate for awhile on it, I can tell you it's more complicated than this lame article makes it sound.
Unfortunately I wasn't able to find a copy of their actual paper (it may not be published yet,) and newspaper articles just aren't conscious enough to be very usable as sources here. I have read some of this guys earlier papers, along with others, and I at least have some background on what they're talking about though.
It's been known for quite some time that handedness is associated with Broca's Area a part of the brain generally associated with language. However, the simplistic equation of Broca's area = language is not necessarily true - our understanding of the brain isn't that fine-grained, Broca's area may have several function, or may actually be several organs we're conflating. It's also definately associated with some motor functions, for instance facial gestures, and it's been argued that it's primary function may be one of motor control, not language. So what exactly handedness being associated with Broca's means is still clearly up for debate.
This paper by Corballis, is probably the best summary of recent research on the question that I'm able to find a clear link to for you right now - not that it's nearly thorough enough to serve that purpose really, but it does cover a lot of ground, and most articles like this are not available without subscription. Anyway, it has been argued that handedness was caused by language, but it's also been argued, for instance, that human language arose originally from a mixture of manual gestures, facial gestures, and involuntary vocalisations which change soundshape with those facial gestures, thus becoming distinguishable representations of them. In this scenario, Broca's primary function was motor control, and it became associated with language before language became the primarily vocal thing it is for most of us today.
What exactly Hopkins new data is, and what exactly he's arguing it shows, I honestly can't figure out from this article though. It's not even clear to me whether he's saying he has more evidence that Broca's is primarily a motor control centre, rather than a language center, or if he's found an association with another part of the brain entirely. I am looking forward to reading his actual paper.
It's not anything stupid like that. Of course computers turn off when there's no power, and of course RAM is volatile. All he's saying is that you shouldn't be sitting there working on something for an hour, lose power for a second, and lose all your work. And he's right. What he's talking about is what EMACS has been doing for many many years - writing temporary recovery files regularly, and checking for them on startup. This way if you do lose power, after a reboot and fsck, you restart your app, open the file you were working on, and get the option to go to your autosave file and pick up very close to the moment that the machine died.
Like I said, EMACS has been doing this for years, it's a very nice feature, and there's absolutely no excuse for all the other apps that still don't do this.
Pop-Up windows which steal focus immediately from whatever task has focus (active rather than passive bulletins) Ever been typing something, and hit ENTER just as something pops up? Gee, what the heck was that about?
This is inexcusable, and all too common on windows. However, if you'd used a Mac, you know they don't do that. When an application demands focus it doesn't get it - it just gets a bouncing icon in your task bar to let you know it's whining.
While I agree that that post wasn't as clear as it might have been, it made some good points.
If they don't like it, they don't have to sell it.
Makes zero logical sense.
Makes great sense, actually. What he's saying is that they can't have their cake and eat it too. They want to sell things - they want our money - but then they don't want to accept all the consequences of that sale. When you say, "if you don't like it, you don't have to buy it" you're certainly making no more sense than this poster was when he reversed it on you and said "if they don't like it, then they don't have to sell it."
The rest of your responses (Hooked on phonics for instance) really come off as being quite trollish, I must say. If an argument is "old and busted" fine, but it's not readily apparent that it is, and you need to back that assessment up with some sort of argument if you want it to be taken seriously.
A license is a grant of privileges. These 'licenses' on the other hand purport to grant no privileges, but rather to take away those that the purchaser already has.
I agree with don't buy it - and I don't buy these things. I think it's important not to give money to people that are clearly planning to spend it to corrupt the legal system. But at the same time, I'm not about to take the position that you seem to be taking, that those who do purchase these things must follow the letter of 'licenses' that grant no license and 'agreements' that are not agreed upon.
In fact, if you have a clue, you do fight fire with fire. One of the most effective ways to battle large, out of control fires, and without it forest fires would do a LOT more damage, every year.
Slashdot Mirror
First, if you actually wrote a proper website in the first place, you do NOT need to create or maintain two versions. This is a myth perpetrated by incompetent self-styled "designers" that never bothered to learn to understand the media they're working in.
If you made a godawful pile of crud instead of a webpage, then you shouldn't make a new, good version and maintain them both, you should make a new, good version and delete the crud.
So for people that have proper websites, the costs involved are very close to nonexistent. And those that don't, should really get one anyway, mobile phones or no mobile phones. So this is all a red herring.
There is definately a business case for making your site as accessible and useful as possible for as many of your customers as possible. There's also a great business case for supporting early adopters. If you're the first, it's a great strategic move. If you're not the first, you'll wind up following a little later, and not having as good a position. The business case is there. The fact that it involves old fashioned capitalist principle of offering value to the consumer instead of conforming to the Enron philosophy of grab the money and run prevelant with management folks in the US these days doesn't mean it doesn't make business sense - just that the US corporate management culture isn't particularly agile or smart.
You're quite correct that, all other things being equal, it's an advantage to have shiny-pretty. But the notion that you have to choose between pretty on the one hand and correct and accessible on the other. That's simply not true. And a website that has functionality problems, that relies on things like flash (you CAN use flash without relying on it, it's not very difficult, but using it improperly without providing for graceful degredation is what I'm talking about here) or is simply very poorly written, no matter how pretty it may appear when first loaded up in the most popular browser, isn't going to do the company behind it any favours in the long run.
Sounds to me like you're the one that lost the plot - or never had it.
Lee designed the web explicitly, from the beginning, to wrap content inside logical tags so as to enable an infinite variety of devices, with very different properties and different media, to parse and present that content properly for the particular environment.
He may or may not have anticipated mobile phone technology expliclitly, but when the man designed the web so that browsers with capablities reaching from small text-only displays to the largest CRTs and even by browsers with no screen at all (such as blind people use, for instance) could all have easy access to the same data, formatted however is appropriate for each end users individual "display environment" - he's being quite consistent.
Why would you use pdf to print plain text data?
I have it from several sources that the source license was common with business customers, and not difficult for any customer to obtain generally. I wish I could remember the name of the book, I know I read that someone that worked at MS in the early days mentioned that they had it. As to the demonstration and easter egg, yes, I believe the only credible sources specify a very early version of DOS. But assuming that the story is essentially true, it would mean for sure that there was some copyright infringement from CP/M source code, something which both Patterson and Microsoft probably had both motive and opportunity to do. Funny he would bring this up now though...
Well, here's the thing. CP/M licensees got source code. Microsoft had it. Patterson had it. Then years later IIRC, Killdall stood up in court and entered a keystrokes at a PC running MSDOS and brought up an easter egg he had programmed into CP/M years earlier, proving they had used his code.
As a result, he wound up getting lots of money and use of the MSDOS codebase to keep DR DOS compatible.
Patterson seems like the most likely source for the copying, but I've never seen that proven or any proof attempted.
Get this through your head. Free speech rights don't compel others to PAY for a media for you to speak on. It does not provide a cover for theft or trespass.
No, we want a theft of services is bad law, and that's not a slippery slope at all. Unsolicited bulk email is the problem. Your clueless ****wit presumably is not asking for help with bulk mailings, so he's fine. The guy that wants to send yo ua pleby is fine too - unless he's got a big list of folks he's offering it to all at once. Commercial speech is fine. Bulk email, for that matter, is fine - as long as it's explicitly solicited.
Where's the slippery slope?
Theft of services is not "free speech".
But it IS, in fact, inevitable with spam. Anyone with the slightest experience dealing with spam knows that. It's theoretically possible for a spammer to operate without stealing services, but it's not as a practical matter. In order to do that they would have to confine themselves to spamming on spam-friendly networks, which would mean spamming almost no one but each other. No spammer has ever been satisfied with that.
And as you damn well know the vast majority of the cost involved there is paid by the junk mailer. Materials, design, printing, postage... and they pay high postage, in effect subsidising the entire postal system. For this they get delivery.
Email spammers often pay nothing whatsoever to send, and never pay any significant fraction of the total transmission cost in any event. Very different situations.
The email system was designed for and implemented in nearly every installation for one on one or small-group conversations between people who are acquainted or have business together. Sending millions of emails to random addresses can never be anything but an assault on the email system - an act of trespass, theft, and vandalism, not of communication.
Free speech does not and has never given you the right to come spray paint your message on my house, and the invention of the net shouldn't change that.
Short and wrong. Recording radio broadcasts, even making your own mix tapes with them as long as you don't use those for commercial purposes, is and has always been legal. The record companies never really opposed that as far as I know. Broadcast radio tends to be their conscious tool, and the quality is low and gets lower with remixing - unlike digital media - all of which made the tape recorder much less threatening technology in the view of the record companies in its day than digital recordings are seen by them now.
No sir, you are not.
Doh. Exactly.
No, the whole LSB thing is pretty well irrelevant to software. It's about binary package compatibility, and only really interesting or useful for people that want to try and sell linux binaries instead. Which is one of the reasons you'll find lots of important people (Volkerding comes to mind) either apathetic or openly contemptuous of the thing, while the support for it comes mostly from folks like RedHat and Suse/Novell that are in the business of supporting their distro as a platform for things like, for example, Oracle, that are not and likely never will be available any other way.
Back in the mid 90s, I did that. Hit a great many remove-me links. Spam did drop for a short period of time, but within a few months it was back with a vengeance. That address is now completely unusable, I get about 5 spams an hour on it, and have long since given up on actually being able to use it.
What happened, I think, is that the spammers in many cases did remove me from their own mailing list - while simultaneously adding me to the 'confirmed good' list they sold to other spammers.
I agree with what you're saying, but strictly on word-usage letter I've got to crucify you. 'Software' is source code, pure and simple. Yes, the folks that want you to think software means 'licensed' binaries have tons of marketing muscle and common usage reflects that, but if we concede these sorts of battles we lose the war. Software is soft, not hard, because it's easily modified. Binaries are not easily modifiable, therefore they're clearly not software, I would call it 'firmware' but that word is understood to have a slightly different meaning. At any rate, whatever you want to call it, if it isn't source, it's not software.
Clearly any language expression, any expression at all, requires some motor-control involvement.
IIRC, areas such as Brocas, and the 'mirror neurons' in particular, are active in humans both when thinking quietly and when listening to someone else speak, as well as when reading.
Only partially. Studies have shown that it is clearly inborn. However, environment can reshape it to a degree. Many lefties are taught to shoot and write as if they were righties, for instance - but they still tend toward the left in areas where it wasn't trained out of them. And righties, even with plenty of motivation and training, have a very hard time simulating a left. Ask any right-handed boxer.
This is fairly common actually. I think handedness is not so much a binary thing, as a continuum, although it's usually pretty heavily slanted to the right (but 'lefties' are often closer to ambidextrous.) At any rate, shooting is something where most lefties learn to go righty, as most firearms are right-handed, and left-handed models are rare and more expensive. Probably the best single test is which hand you catch something in, if it's thrown at you by surprise so you don't have time to think. My guess is that most researchers would classify you as a nearly ambidextrous lefty, but it's just a guess.
Yes, this is the intent. HTML does not, has never, and G-d willing will never specify how to render anything. It's not a layout language, it's a logical language. This is why it's so nice. So-called "web designers" that don't like this fact should find another medium more to their taste, and good riddance.
Not only was it not a goatse.cz link, it was exactly the papers that the article should have linked to!
Thanks, Lisa, and say, why not get yourself a user account?
Being that this is related to my work, and I've been following the debate for awhile on it, I can tell you it's more complicated than this lame article makes it sound.
Unfortunately I wasn't able to find a copy of their actual paper (it may not be published yet,) and newspaper articles just aren't conscious enough to be very usable as sources here. I have read some of this guys earlier papers, along with others, and I at least have some background on what they're talking about though.
It's been known for quite some time that handedness is associated with Broca's Area a part of the brain generally associated with language. However, the simplistic equation of Broca's area = language is not necessarily true - our understanding of the brain isn't that fine-grained, Broca's area may have several function, or may actually be several organs we're conflating. It's also definately associated with some motor functions, for instance facial gestures, and it's been argued that it's primary function may be one of motor control, not language. So what exactly handedness being associated with Broca's means is still clearly up for debate.
This paper by Corballis, is probably the best summary of recent research on the question that I'm able to find a clear link to for you right now - not that it's nearly thorough enough to serve that purpose really, but it does cover a lot of ground, and most articles like this are not available without subscription. Anyway, it has been argued that handedness was caused by language, but it's also been argued, for instance, that human language arose originally from a mixture of manual gestures, facial gestures, and involuntary vocalisations which change soundshape with those facial gestures, thus becoming distinguishable representations of them. In this scenario, Broca's primary function was motor control, and it became associated with language before language became the primarily vocal thing it is for most of us today.
What exactly Hopkins new data is, and what exactly he's arguing it shows, I honestly can't figure out from this article though. It's not even clear to me whether he's saying he has more evidence that Broca's is primarily a motor control centre, rather than a language center, or if he's found an association with another part of the brain entirely. I am looking forward to reading his actual paper.
It's not anything stupid like that. Of course computers turn off when there's no power, and of course RAM is volatile. All he's saying is that you shouldn't be sitting there working on something for an hour, lose power for a second, and lose all your work. And he's right. What he's talking about is what EMACS has been doing for many many years - writing temporary recovery files regularly, and checking for them on startup. This way if you do lose power, after a reboot and fsck, you restart your app, open the file you were working on, and get the option to go to your autosave file and pick up very close to the moment that the machine died.
Like I said, EMACS has been doing this for years, it's a very nice feature, and there's absolutely no excuse for all the other apps that still don't do this.
This is inexcusable, and all too common on windows. However, if you'd used a Mac, you know they don't do that. When an application demands focus it doesn't get it - it just gets a bouncing icon in your task bar to let you know it's whining.
While I agree that that post wasn't as clear as it might have been, it made some good points.
Makes great sense, actually. What he's saying is that they can't have their cake and eat it too. They want to sell things - they want our money - but then they don't want to accept all the consequences of that sale. When you say, "if you don't like it, you don't have to buy it" you're certainly making no more sense than this poster was when he reversed it on you and said "if they don't like it, then they don't have to sell it."
The rest of your responses (Hooked on phonics for instance) really come off as being quite trollish, I must say. If an argument is "old and busted" fine, but it's not readily apparent that it is, and you need to back that assessment up with some sort of argument if you want it to be taken seriously.
A license is a grant of privileges. These 'licenses' on the other hand purport to grant no privileges, but rather to take away those that the purchaser already has.
I agree with don't buy it - and I don't buy these things. I think it's important not to give money to people that are clearly planning to spend it to corrupt the legal system. But at the same time, I'm not about to take the position that you seem to be taking, that those who do purchase these things must follow the letter of 'licenses' that grant no license and 'agreements' that are not agreed upon.
In fact, if you have a clue, you do fight fire with fire. One of the most effective ways to battle large, out of control fires, and without it forest fires would do a LOT more damage, every year.