I'm looking forward to this -- from what I understand, Mozilla will be far snappier than Netscape is, particularly on older machines with limited RAM.
I'm not so sure. I've tried M12 and the some of the latest nightly builds, but the user interface seems sluggish (on my P200). This is apparently because they use their own custom user interface rather than native operating system widgets and this slows things down.
Not at all. IE actually does render pages faster. Try loading pages over a slow connection - IE is capable of displaying and then dynamically redrawing pages as more information about the page is available (e.g. image sizes). Mozilla should be able to do this as well.
Bullshit. If my antilock brakes fail because of a defective part, whoever manufactured that part is liable. If those same antilock brakes, or some metaphorical equivalent thereof, fail because of a software glitch, then the writer of that software should be equally liable.
What you've described falls under the category of mission critical applications, which I agree should be held to much higher standards - and if I'm not mistaken, is in fact held to higher standards by the law. But this wasn't the type of software I was thinking of. I was thinking of retail, off-the-shelf software, and most retail software explicitly says in the EULA that the software is not for use in mission critical applications (like hospitals, flight control systems, etc.)
So, if I shrink-wrap the 'hello world' program as a Low Cost, Completely Secure Alternative To WorkingFirewallWhatever, with a disclaimer that says (may not do what the box says, and it's expressly forbidden to publish comparisons or benchmarks of the product without FooCorp's written permission) I can quite happily sell that and _never_ have to worry about bad print-press reviews.
I think this would fall under the category of gross negligence. My point is that provided the software publisher has made reasonable effort to ensure that the software performs as stated, and has not deliberately hidden critical information from the consumer, then the software publisher should not be held liable if flaws are later uncovered in the product.
Licensors can exclude incidental and consequential damages even when an agreed remedy fails of its essential purpose.
Ironically, the Badsoftware page has this disclaimer (at the bottom of the page):
"The articles at this web site are not legal advice. They do not establish a lawyer/client relationship between me and you. I took care to ensure that they were well researched at the time that I wrote them, but the law changes quickly. By the time you read this material, it may be out of date. Also, the laws of the different States are not the same. These discussions might not apply to your circumstances. Please do not take legal action on the basis of what you read here, without consulting your own attorney."
i.e. The material on the page may not fulfil its essential purpose.
Now this doesn't sound all that different from the standard disclaimer of warranties found in all software licensing agreements does it?
Software publishers should be held responsible for gross negligence or for intentionally witholding essential information from the customer, but no more than that. When I write a piece of software, I cannot guarantee that it will function in a certain way, even if that is the essential purpose of the software - software is simply too complex. e.g. if I write a piece of software for securing a system, I cannot guarantee that the system will now be uncrackable. Placing unreasonable demands on software developer will have a chilling effect on software produced in this country.
If hot springs or vents still exist on Mars, they'd probably provide similar sources of chemical energy for microbes.
It's unlikely that there's still liquid water on Mars. Which means that if there was ever life on Mars, it'd probably be extinct by now. In that case does this mean that it's impossible to show that life on Earth originated from Mars? No.
". Lack of support doesn't prove anything, it just doesn't give any grounds for believing it.
My point is that your criteria for evidence is unreasonable. You want direct evidence, in the form of a comparison between living organisms, one from Mars and another one from Earth. This is in all likelihood neither possible nor necessary.
Life on Mars, if it existed, will likely be extinct by now. So comparing existing life on Mars with life on Earth will probably not be possible.
What you're asking for is direct, observational evidence i.e. find life on Mars, and compare. If we can't find any existing life on Mars, reject the theory. Therefore the analogy to creationism: you will accept only direct observational evidence, which is neither necessary nor possible to produce.
There's only one thing that could give a solid (though not irrefutable) indication that Earth life originated on Mars: we go to Mars and we find a number of varieties of life, only one or two of which biochemically match the major categories found on Earth. Articles like the Wired piece are a waste of bits.
You sound like one of those Creationists who say: there's no evidence for evolution - the only way we can prove that evolution occured is if we see it happening with our very own eyes. Duh.
There's such a thing as scientific inference and deduction. We may not be able to conclusively "prove" (is there ever such a thing in science?) that life on Earth originated from Mars, but we can find good evidence for or against such a theory. Examples might be: signs of past life on Mars, evidence in meteorites found on Earth, etc.
Ok, how about this (I'm not sure whether I've got the lingo right, but I hope the idea comes through):
We have the twin photons, photon A and photon B. Adam takes photon A and Bob takes photon B. Bob will go on a journey on a space shuttle to a distant system light years away. Before they leave, they have an agreement: at some time in the future, they will both look at their photons. If the photon has Spin up, then Adam will set off a bomb that destroys that world. Otherwise, the Earth will be spared.
So Bob goes on his journey and years later he looks at the photon and discovers instantaneously whether the Earth has been destroyed or not.
So is this communication or not? I guess the same effect can be achieved by having a third party throw a dice and write the result in a sealed envelope given to both parties before Bob leaves, but it seems that the photon does convey some information.
That's all fine and well for spiritual enlightenment. But would you rather ride in an airplane piloted by someone who has flown 1 hour in the simulator a day for a year, or 4 hours a day for a year?
I would prefer to ride an airplane piloted by someone who has flown a simulator 4 hours a day than 1 hour a day. But on the other hand, I wouldn't get into an airplane with a pilot who practiced 16 hours a day, every day - I would seriously question the sanity of such a person.
Likewise I'd rather entrust my vital electronic infrastructure with geeks who spend all day, or 4 hours a day, learning code, vs 1 hour a day.
Coding isn't difficult. If you just want to be a coder, perhaps you should go ahead and spend all day coding. But if you want to be more than a coder - if you want to be an innovator, a creative scientist, etc. then you need a broader perspective - which requires going out and doing things other than coding.
A friend and I have just released a Java application. We use encryption to password protect web pages securely (plug: www.guardbot.com). The software comes in 2 parts, a Java applet decoder which performs the on-the-fly decryption of web pages, and a Java encoder which performs the encryption.
Without the Java's write once run anywhere capability, the decoder would have been impossible to deliver succesfully (without resorting to platform specific browser plugins, which would have put off a lot of users). Writing the encoder portion of the software let us deliver the software simultaneously to any Java supporting platform - without Java, we would probably have limited our software to Windows (at least initially).
Client side Java is not worthless, and I'd say that write once run anywhere is an extremely worthwhile goal - I'd very much like to see Sun deliver on this. As it stands, only Solaris and Windows have working Java 2 implementations, which is extremely disappointing.
I use a free site statistics service to keep track of hits to my web site, where I keep some software that I've written. Looking at the referrer statistics to my site, the vast majority of hits are generated from explicit, categorized links to my site (e.g. bookmark pages and surprisingly Lycos which has a categorized database), and rarely ever from general search engines like Altavista. The questioner may be right - from the perspective of a web site owner, general search engines aren't very effective at bringing visitors to my site.
I'm not sure turning Java over to a standards commitee would be a good thing. Commitees move slowly, they bicker, and ultimately there's no legal reason why individual companies have to abide by the standards (e.g. C). For something as politically charged as Java, it's possible that we may need a company like Sun behind it to sue companies like Microsoft that deviate from the standards. Yes, Java needs to be more open, but I don't think turning Java over to a standards commitee will make things any better than they are now.
I ran VMWare for NT on a p200/MMX with 80Megs of ram and it was ok running Linux. I've even seen VMWare for Linux on a cyrix 166 with 64 Megs, running Win 95 and it worked pretty decently.
If you had actually read Richard Smith's article, you'll see that he addresses the issue of how the Ad company actually gets the email to the user:
1. Rent space on a mailing list where advertising is already sent out. Embed invisible GIFs in the email.
2. Get into the email servicing business or acquire an email servicing company.
Even then, though, what good would linking the cookie to their e-mail address do but to promote more spam?
From the company's point of view, it allows them to build better user profiles. e.g. several companies could get together and combine their databases (based on the email addresses that they now have) to build a profile of you the user.
won't appeal to reputable companies, who the advertising companies are targeting for money.
Eventually, the easy passwords will pass and the user, understanding the consequense on having stupid-type security, will embrace passwords like 1guYbv%^&bbejkkc
The more difficult the password is to rememeber, the more likely the user will write it down (somewhere the admin can't see). There needs to be a balance between the guessability of the password and the likeliness of the user writing it down.
Yes, but will these new technologies give that much more room for growth i.e. doubling every 18th months for the next 10 years? Switching to copper doesn't help, because it just gives an instantaneous boost but doesn't help to sustain Moore's law over an extended period of time.
I don't know what SOI does, but it sounds like a wildly exaggerated claim by IBM.
Ok, the article says we get a 50% improvement. How does that translate to sustaining Moore's law for 10 years, which requires a 100% improvement every 18 months?
We're not really living in a high bandwidth world at the moment. Most of the content you see is designed for low bandwidth users. So while their claim that most customers will save from the switch-over may be true at the moment, in the long term, as high bandwidth content becomes more and more prevalent (video, live conferencing, etc.), everyone will end up paying more.
The same thing happened in my country, but this time with phone lines. The national telephone monopoly, in a prescient move, decided to charge time based rates for local phone calls that were formerly free. This happened right before the Internet became prevalent. Their claim was that most users would save from the switch-over: which was true, at that moment. But as the Internet became more and more popular and people were connecting with their modems, the money rolled in and people payed through their noses.
If this doesn't convince you, think about it: why would the company make such a change if their line that the vast majority of customers would save were true, and they didn't believe that it would make them more money in the long run.
Most of the 'Your Rights Online' articles have been, IMO, non-issues, this one included. People say "If we let them do this then they will keep going until they send our entire lives back!" No. If someone starts sending back e-mail addresses without permission or other very private information THEN we start boycotting and raising hell. Until then just relax, vote with your dollar, send polite e-mails if you don't agree with something and just deal with the larger issues.
I'm reminded of a quotation by Benjamin Franklin: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
If we value our rights, then those rights must be vigorously and unyieldingly defended. If we give in a little now, then we have eroded the foundation on which our liberty stands, and it becomes easier to give in again tommorow, and the day after tommorow.
History has shown, again and again, that little injustices if tolerated, lead to greater and greater injustices. Take World War II as an extreme example.
What we've seen so far is only the start. Without vigorous resistance now to violations of privacy, our right to privacy may disappear overnight. In this case, the line is very clear: software must not covertly send back data to their companies. Anything else is unacceptable.
The killer used online research agencies to find out information about his target. The killer even advises: "It's actually obsene (sic) what you can find out about people on the Internet".
Take his advice: refuse this gross invasion of privacy.
Back in the 80s, a company produced software which they advertised with the tagline: "Finally, a machine that understands you like your mother."
The great irony, of course, was that no machine natural language system in the world - even today - can deal with the sentence "Finally, a machine that understands you as well as your mother." (think about the possible shades of meaning)
Getting this information has been usefull. We can compare the numbers of people playing with a given card with the amount of support emails we field, so we know which vendors (3DFX) we need to give more crap about their driver quality.
I think John Carmack doesn't get it. The information sent in this case is fairly harmless, and I can see that it could be beneficial to me, the gamer. If you asked, I'd probably agree to let you have the information.
But for goodness sake, ask first! If you want something from someone (especially someone you don't know), it's basic courtesy to ask first, even if you think he'll let you have it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm looking forward to this -- from what I understand, Mozilla will be far snappier than Netscape is, particularly on older machines with limited RAM.
I'm not so sure. I've tried M12 and the some of the latest nightly builds, but the user interface seems sluggish (on my P200). This is apparently because they use their own custom user interface rather than native operating system widgets and this slows things down.
Not at all. IE actually does render pages faster. Try loading pages over a slow connection - IE is capable of displaying and then dynamically redrawing pages as more information about the page is available (e.g. image sizes). Mozilla should be able to do this as well.
Bullshit. If my antilock brakes fail because of a defective part, whoever manufactured that part is liable. If those same antilock brakes, or some metaphorical equivalent thereof, fail because of a software glitch, then the writer of that software should be equally liable.
What you've described falls under the category of mission critical applications, which I agree should be held to much higher standards - and if I'm not mistaken, is in fact held to higher standards by the law. But this wasn't the type of software I was thinking of. I was thinking of retail, off-the-shelf software, and most retail software explicitly says in the EULA that the software is not for use in mission critical applications (like hospitals, flight control systems, etc.)
So, if I shrink-wrap the 'hello world' program as a Low Cost, Completely Secure Alternative To WorkingFirewallWhatever, with a disclaimer that says (may not do what the box says, and it's expressly forbidden to publish comparisons or benchmarks of the product without FooCorp's written permission) I can quite happily sell that and _never_ have to worry about bad print-press reviews.
I think this would fall under the category of gross negligence. My point is that provided the software publisher has made reasonable effort to ensure that the software performs as stated, and has not deliberately hidden critical information from the consumer, then the software publisher should not be held liable if flaws are later uncovered in the product.
Licensors can exclude incidental and consequential damages even when an agreed remedy fails of its essential purpose.
Ironically, the Badsoftware page has this disclaimer (at the bottom of the page):
"The articles at this web site are not legal advice. They do not establish a lawyer/client relationship between me and you. I took care to ensure that they were well researched at the time that I wrote them, but the law changes quickly. By the time you read this material, it may be out of date. Also, the laws of the different States are not the same. These discussions might not apply to your circumstances. Please do not take legal action on the basis of what you read here, without consulting your own attorney."
i.e. The material on the page may not fulfil its essential purpose.
Now this doesn't sound all that different from the standard disclaimer of warranties found in all software licensing agreements does it?
Software publishers should be held responsible for gross negligence or for intentionally witholding essential information from the customer, but no more than that. When I write a piece of software, I cannot guarantee that it will function in a certain way, even if that is the essential purpose of the software - software is simply too complex. e.g. if I write a piece of software for securing a system, I cannot guarantee that the system will now be uncrackable. Placing unreasonable demands on software developer will have a chilling effect on software produced in this country.
If hot springs or vents still exist on Mars, they'd probably provide similar sources of chemical energy for microbes.
It's unlikely that there's still liquid water on Mars. Which means that if there was ever life on Mars, it'd probably be extinct by now. In that case does this mean that it's impossible to show that life on Earth originated from Mars? No.
". Lack of support doesn't prove anything, it just doesn't give any grounds for believing it.
My point is that your criteria for evidence is unreasonable. You want direct evidence, in the form of a comparison between living organisms, one from Mars and another one from Earth. This is in all likelihood neither possible nor necessary.
Life on Mars, if it existed, will likely be extinct by now. So comparing existing life on Mars with life on Earth will probably not be possible.
What you're asking for is direct, observational evidence i.e. find life on Mars, and compare. If we can't find any existing life on Mars, reject the theory. Therefore the analogy to creationism: you will accept only direct observational evidence, which is neither necessary nor possible to produce.
There's only one thing that could give a solid (though not irrefutable) indication that Earth life originated on Mars: we go to Mars and we find a number of varieties of life, only one or two of which biochemically match the major categories found on Earth. Articles like the Wired piece are a waste of bits.
You sound like one of those Creationists who say: there's no evidence for evolution - the only way we can prove that evolution occured is if we see it happening with our very own eyes. Duh.
There's such a thing as scientific inference and deduction. We may not be able to conclusively "prove" (is there ever such a thing in science?) that life on Earth originated from Mars, but we can find good evidence for or against such a theory. Examples might be: signs of past life on Mars, evidence in meteorites found on Earth, etc.
Check out http://www.robocup.org , a robot soccer competition where autonomous robots play team soccer.
Ok, how about this (I'm not sure whether I've got the lingo right, but I hope the idea comes through):
We have the twin photons, photon A and photon B. Adam takes photon A and Bob takes photon B. Bob will go on a journey on a space shuttle to a distant system light years away. Before they leave, they have an agreement: at some time in the future, they will both look at their photons. If the photon has Spin up, then Adam will set off a bomb that destroys that world. Otherwise, the Earth will be spared.
So Bob goes on his journey and years later he looks at the photon and discovers instantaneously whether the Earth has been destroyed or not.
So is this communication or not? I guess the same effect can be achieved by having a third party throw a dice and write the result in a sealed envelope given to both parties before Bob leaves, but it seems that the photon does convey some information.
That's all fine and well for spiritual enlightenment. But would you rather ride in an airplane piloted by someone who has flown 1 hour in the simulator a day for a year, or 4 hours a day for a year?
I would prefer to ride an airplane piloted by someone who has flown a simulator 4 hours a day than 1 hour a day. But on the other hand, I wouldn't get into an airplane with a pilot who practiced 16 hours a day, every day - I would seriously question the sanity of such a person.
Likewise I'd rather entrust my vital electronic infrastructure with geeks who spend all day, or 4 hours a day, learning code, vs 1 hour a day.
Coding isn't difficult. If you just want to be a coder, perhaps you should go ahead and spend all day coding. But if you want to be more than a coder - if you want to be an innovator, a creative scientist, etc. then you need a broader perspective - which requires going out and doing things other than coding.
A friend and I have just released a Java application. We use encryption to password protect web pages securely (plug: www.guardbot.com). The software comes in 2 parts, a Java applet decoder which performs the on-the-fly decryption of web pages, and a Java encoder which performs the encryption.
Without the Java's write once run anywhere capability, the decoder would have been impossible to deliver succesfully (without resorting to platform specific browser plugins, which would have put off a lot of users). Writing the encoder portion of the software let us deliver the software simultaneously to any Java supporting platform - without Java, we would probably have limited our software to Windows (at least initially).
Client side Java is not worthless, and I'd say that write once run anywhere is an extremely worthwhile goal - I'd very much like to see Sun deliver on this. As it stands, only Solaris and Windows have working Java 2 implementations, which is extremely disappointing.
I'm surprised World War 2 isn't on the list. It may be repetitive to have both WW1 and WW2 on the list - but it shows that people never learn.
I use a free site statistics service to keep track of hits to my web site, where I keep some software that I've written. Looking at the referrer statistics to my site, the vast majority of hits are generated from explicit, categorized links to my site (e.g. bookmark pages and surprisingly Lycos which has a categorized database), and rarely ever from general search engines like Altavista. The questioner may be right - from the perspective of a web site owner, general search engines aren't very effective at bringing visitors to my site.
I'm not sure turning Java over to a standards commitee would be a good thing. Commitees move slowly, they bicker, and ultimately there's no legal reason why individual companies have to abide by the standards (e.g. C). For something as politically charged as Java, it's possible that we may need a company like Sun behind it to sue companies like Microsoft that deviate from the standards. Yes, Java needs to be more open, but I don't think turning Java over to a standards commitee will make things any better than they are now.
I ran VMWare for NT on a p200/MMX with 80Megs of ram and it was ok running Linux. I've even seen VMWare for Linux on a cyrix 166 with 64 Megs, running Win 95 and it worked pretty decently.
If you had actually read Richard Smith's article, you'll see that he addresses the issue of how the Ad company actually gets the email to the user:
1. Rent space on a mailing list where advertising is already sent out. Embed invisible GIFs in the email.
2. Get into the email servicing business or acquire an email servicing company.
Even then, though, what good would linking the cookie to their e-mail address do but to promote more spam?
From the company's point of view, it allows them to build better user profiles. e.g. several companies could get together and combine their databases (based on the email addresses that they now have) to build a profile of you the user.
won't appeal to reputable companies, who the advertising companies are targeting for money.
Think RealJukebox.
Eventually, the easy passwords will pass and the user, understanding the consequense on having stupid-type security, will embrace passwords like 1guYbv%^&bbejkkc
The more difficult the password is to rememeber, the more likely the user will write it down (somewhere the admin can't see). There needs to be a balance between the guessability of the password and the likeliness of the user writing it down.
Yes, but will these new technologies give that much more room for growth i.e. doubling every 18th months for the next 10 years? Switching to copper doesn't help, because it just gives an instantaneous boost but doesn't help to sustain Moore's law over an extended period of time.
I don't know what SOI does, but it sounds like a wildly exaggerated claim by IBM.
Ok, the article says we get a 50% improvement. How does that translate to sustaining Moore's law for 10 years, which requires a 100% improvement every 18 months?
We're not really living in a high bandwidth world at the moment. Most of the content you see is designed for low bandwidth users. So while their claim that most customers will save from the switch-over may be true at the moment, in the long term, as high bandwidth content becomes more and more prevalent (video, live conferencing, etc.), everyone will end up paying more.
The same thing happened in my country, but this time with phone lines. The national telephone monopoly, in a prescient move, decided to charge time based rates for local phone calls that were formerly free. This happened right before the Internet became prevalent. Their claim was that most users would save from the switch-over: which was true, at that moment. But as the Internet became more and more popular and people were connecting with their modems, the money rolled in and people payed through their noses.
If this doesn't convince you, think about it: why would the company make such a change if their line that the vast majority of customers would save were true, and they didn't believe that it would make them more money in the long run.
Most of the 'Your Rights Online' articles have been, IMO, non-issues, this one included. People say "If we let them do this then they will keep going until they send our entire lives back!" No. If someone starts sending back e-mail addresses without permission or other very private information THEN we start boycotting and raising hell. Until then just relax, vote with your dollar, send polite e-mails if you don't agree with something and just deal with the larger issues.
I'm reminded of a quotation by Benjamin Franklin: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
If we value our rights, then those rights must be vigorously and unyieldingly defended. If we give in a little now, then we have eroded the foundation on which our liberty stands, and it becomes easier to give in again tommorow, and the day after tommorow.
History has shown, again and again, that little injustices if tolerated, lead to greater and greater injustices. Take World War II as an extreme example.
What we've seen so far is only the start. Without vigorous resistance now to violations of privacy, our right to privacy may disappear overnight. In this case, the line is very clear: software must not covertly send back data to their companies. Anything else is unacceptable.
It's just his way of avoiding slashdotting the site too badly.
http://www.cnn.com/US/9 911/29/internet.murder.ap/index.html
The killer used online research agencies to find out information about his target. The killer even advises: "It's actually obsene (sic) what you can find out about people on the Internet".
Take his advice: refuse this gross invasion of privacy.
Back in the 80s, a company produced software which they advertised with the tagline: "Finally, a machine that understands you like your mother."
The great irony, of course, was that no machine natural language system in the world - even today - can deal with the sentence "Finally, a machine that understands you as well as your mother." (think about the possible shades of meaning)
Getting this information has been usefull. We can compare the numbers of people playing with a given card with the amount of support emails we field, so we know which vendors (3DFX) we need to give more crap about their driver quality.
I think John Carmack doesn't get it. The information sent in this case is fairly harmless, and I can see that it could be beneficial to me, the gamer. If you asked, I'd probably agree to let you have the information.
But for goodness sake, ask first! If you want something from someone (especially someone you don't know), it's basic courtesy to ask first, even if you think he'll let you have it.