spr93

usenet and irc are quite old. how are they examples of some mythical point at which the internet was unlocked by services?

centralized and decentralized would include almost any service. your comment is so vague and ambiguous as to be meaningless. (that's a hallmark of LLM output. are you a bot?)

it was easier to find authoritative answers 20-30 years ago. google and, before that, altavista and yahoo, were quite good at directing queries to things like university-run information sites or legitimate, curated commercial sites. for the last decade the first google page has been crammed with useless SEO optimized fluff.

as for shopping, that was the first dotcom boom. what really took it mainstream was covid. not centralized or decentralized collaborative nonsense.

Meet the new Microsoft - same as the old one. This is the same reasoning that led to a decade of mindnumbingly obvious exploits against Internet Explorer. You've got to create secure defaults. You have to ask whether your users really want or need some convenience that comes at the expense of an increased attack surface.

He's wrong about capitalization. The "to" in "to allow" is part of the verb (forming the infinitive). It's not a preposition. Dumb flex.

JetBlue has an all Airbus and Embraer 175 fleet. No matter what you book on B6 mainline, you're getting a comfortable airliner.

Virgin America had an all-Airbus fleet...until Alaska bought them and ditched the Airbus leases because 'Merica-Seattle-Boeing or something. (I'm sure they justified it as mechanical/maintenance efficiencies from operating a single type, but they made a bad mistake staying all-in on a failing company's product.)

Delta's famously agnostic - they fly whatever is net cheapest for them, even if it's an old airframe (that they own outright) that sucks fuel (rather than a more fuel-efficient plane that they lease). Boeings got cheap after the MAX problems. On the plus side, Delta is a very well run operation with competent maintenance.

And then there's Southwest. All Boeing, bad maintenance history. A culture that hates change and new technology.

no. that case is about whether notice on shrinkwrap or via a license-acceptance screen can create an enforceable agreement. its not even a copyright issue.

morality has nothing to do with contract (or copyright) law in a common law country.

no one should think that getting cute by "bypassing" an acceptance screen will make a difference to the outcome, let alone be crucial. what matters is whether the user has sufficient notice that using/proceeding/whatever is agreement, and that they had a chance to know what they were agreeing to. theres no special magic in an "agree" box, except insofar as asking the user to click it contributes to notice that the user is making an agreement.

a few concepts you need to start: copyright is a right to exclude. copyright does not arise from your agreement. the copyright attaches to the protected expression.

analogies are dangerous, but these concepts are intuitive if you think in terms of real property.

right to exclude: you have the right to exclude most people, under most circumstances, from your house.

doesn't arise from agreement: you can let joe into your house without an agreement. you can also kick him out whenever you want, unless you and joe made an agreement that limits your right to exclude him (or a legal exception applies).

in our analogy, the agreement might be a lease. (btw, the lease will limit the owner's right to exclude, and it will probably give both sides some non-property--i.e., contractual--rights. telling the two kinds of rights apart is the subject of the article.)

there are exceptions, just like there are exceptions in copyright. you know the names of some of them, like fair use. similarly, there are rights for people who don't have a formal lease, and there are rights that exist even if a lease purports to reject them.

but what you call the "default position" is the same: the property owner has the right to exclude others.

exists wherever the property exists: the right to exclude someone from real property attaches to the land and stays with it. similarly, copyright attaches to the protected expression; the copyright owner's right to exclude is already attached to the copy you have.

now you can see why you don't get to do whatever you want with a copy if you don't have an agreement: the copyright already governs your copy. it lets the copyright owner exclude you. if you want protection against that exclusion, then you need to agree to a license.

that is, of course, a gross oversimplification. for example, you emphasize "copy", but the copyright owner has other rights, such as the right to prepare derivative works, the right to distribute the work, and the right of public display. the act of removing "the 'agree to the gpl' part of the installer" may have created a derivative work, and that in itself would been a copyright violation. on the other hand, just having a copy isn't a copyright violation because "having" isn't a protected right. details like that rarely matter though. i only point them out to illustrate that it's dangerous to make assumptions about what words mean or to think of the law as a battle of semantics.

No way am I giving your startup* my phone number. Maybe you can have a custom-generated, one-use-only email address that I can turn off so you don't spam me. (Your startup may be virtuous, but most startups fail, and then my data becomes an asset that gets sold away in bankruptcy.)

I also hope that your startup has been advised on the very significant TCPA liabilities this approach risks. Even if you do everything right, you're going to face lawsuits saying you don't. I have very mixed feelings about the TCPA, and it does hamper "innovation" in some circumstances, but I am delighted that it carries significant litigation risk for anyone who thinks it's a good idea to send me SMS messages. I. Don't. Want. Them.

microsoft has always had a culture of "just make it work yesterday" that led to shoddy code. they spent a lot of money, some of it on PR and some of it on real work, polishing up some of windows's more egregious problems a couple decades ago. but the attitude is deeply ingrained in the leadership. i also suspect that a lot of cost-cutting demanded by the business side gets implemented by off-shoring work to the cheapest possible workers with the minimum experience necessary to push a product out the door, but im not as familiar with microsoft these days.

Nice write up, but the author is wrong about the GEOS version. Geodes (GEOS executables, drivers, libraries--pretty much anything that "runs") have their own version information (version, release, protocol) in the file header.

The kernel (GEOS.GEO) in BrotherWorks is version 3.0 4-84, protocol 654.054. The archive.org blurb is correct that BrotherWorks is therefore GEOS 3.x.

The 2.0 Ensemble release kernel was 2.0 24-1, proto 654.001. NDO 3's kernel was 3.1 33-1, proto 654.060.

Oddly, the article looks at the GEOS.STR (a file of strings that the DOS start-up code uses for user messages and concludes that an unchanged strings file "proves" the GEOS version.

You are: 1. Consuming medical and emergency resources by creating easily preventable severe injuries 2. Raising raising insurance premiums or burdening public hospitals with the same 3. Potentially burdening the legal system (with a higher likelihood of insurance disputes and because more severe injuries are correlated with a higher probability of a lawsuit against other driver) 4. Endangering your passengers (possibly your children) by making it likely you will be unconscious or less able to get them to safety after a collision and teaching them habits that will make them more likely to die in an accident over the course of their lifetime So, yes, it's completely reasonable for society to impose almost zero cost on you to fasten a seatbelt in exchange for avoiding potentially huge externalities.

TUL: Skoda makes reliable cars at a good price. VW bought them out; they're basically VW models built in Czechia factories that apparently have great quality control. https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/business/skoda-named-most...

What were they a professor of? I don't see a paradox of choice here; none of those Colgate products, or anything else sitting on the shelf that's ADA accepted, is going to rot your teeth.

It is, however, a classic result of oligopoly. Oligopolists compete among themselves--and, more importantly, prevent entry from newcomers--by hyper differentiating their products. The "artificial" product differentiation also makes comparison-shopping harder and softens price competition between the oligopolists. It's a really fascinating, kind of counter-intuitive, but well known dynamic.

E.g., Crest offers a slightly differentiated product--"gleaming white plus plus" or whatever--and Colgate responds with "extra pearly white super plus."

Or a newcomer tries to sell "natural something," so the oligopolists introduce "natural stuff" and "pure friendly paste" to prevent customers that like the sound of "natural" from defecting to the newcomer.

Hotels are the classic case. Hilton and Marriott have tons of brands. Take extended stays for example. Marriott has three extended-stay hotel brands. No one thinks extended-stay hotel customers started a letter-writing campaign to Marriot saying, "I really want an extended-stay hotel that's just like Residence Inn, but with a different color combination. That's where you should invest your money. I don't need nicer furniture or lower prices, thank you. Just give me the new color scheme, thanks."

The dynamic is a counterintuitive feature of oligopolies, but it's very well known. But academia is hyper-specialized, so, yeah, everyone sees their own pet theory in everything.

As others have pointed out, you're wrong about USB-C's minimum standards.

But more important, markets work best when consumers have good information about what they're buying.

Lightning always works as expected. Give me a Lightning cable and a Lightning port and I know what they'll do. Comparison shopping for a Lightning cable is easy.

But making an educated decision about which USB-C cable to buy requires understanding an increasingly complex matrix. You cannot just look at a USB-C cable or port and know what it is; you've got to parse each device or cable's spec sheet (if you can find one). https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/breaking-down-how-us...

The possibility of lock-in to a proprietary system is one piece of information, but consumers aren't getting screwed by lock in to Lightning connectors. It's easy to find a cheap Lightning cable that performs as expected; it's easy to comparison shop for them on price.

Consumers are, however, wasting a lot of money on USB C cables that don't do what they expect because the USB-C "standards" make it extremely difficult for ordinary consumers to know what they're buying.

This kind of piece usually happens because of the following common industry practice:

A company's PR department (usually via an outside publicist) approaches a friendly (or likely friendly) journalist with an idea for the story. They promise special access to company information and lots of quotes for the story. Serious outlets won't let the company "help" with the drafting, but sometimes the company will provide proposed language for all or some of the story.

It's a good arrangement for the company and journalist. The company controls the narrative and plants stories that fit its current PR goals.

The journalist gets an easy piece--more or less pre-packaged and with minimal need to do their own investigation. Journalists have an incentive not to pose difficult questions or push back too hard: Those who do get a "bad" reputation with publicists, leaving them out of the running for future pre-packaged stories.

There are lots of variations on the above. Some aren't nefarious and the result is still good journalism.

And sometimes the result is a transparent puff piece.

Your airplane analogy is apt, but it cuts the other way.

In fact, FedEx likes to buy out Boeing facilities so that they're not "completely reliant" on Boeing for anything.[1]

As for the more general cloud v. on-prem debate, I usually don't like analogies, but the plane analogy is good because jets and logistics-management systems are two things that FedEx needs to handle extremely well to compete.

So, what does FedEx actually do wrt jets?

FedEx both owns and leases them. It mostly owns them outright. Its owned jets are a mix of new-ish to very old (think DC-9s). It also leases and some financing magic (such as some big lease agreements for new 777s a couple years ago).

The reason is that FedEx generally gets excess value from owning rather than leasing, but there are some circumstances where leasing makes sense.

Same goes for "cloud" deployments. The correct answers to cloud "versus" on prem for large organizations like FedEx - "it depends," "that's a false dichotomy," and "it's almost certainly a mix of both" - are neither interesting nor simple, and so those answers don't get execs' attention...or headlines.

For FedEx to brag about taking an extreme position on cloud deployment is breathtakingly foolish. If I were an investor, I'd want to hear something like, "Based on a careful analysis, we've decided to shift certain specific operations to cloud-based systems. We plan to maintain control over the infrastructure and operations of mission-critical systems that have demonstrated resilience." (I'm assuming the latter are systems like the financial institutions rely on, where purpose-built stuff like mainframes using IMS have demonstrated near-zero downtime and darn-near-bug-free software for decades, because FedEx, like banks, needs to handle lots of simultaneous transactions in real time without error or deadlock.)

[1] Example: https://www.ch-aviation.com/portal/news/102874-fedex-to-take...

so use '2>&1' to redirect stderr to stdout.

new ideas are great. but this isn't a new idea. "run a command silently unless it fails" is basic; it's the sort of thing that should make one think "i should search the shell man pages" rather than "i should roll my own new utility."

The Kobo Sage is slightly cheaper (in the US) for a comparable product. Still over $200, but not a lot if you get a Sage on sale and buy via Rakuten for an additional rebate.

I've had a Kindle Oasis (the non-ad-supported version) for a couple years. A couple months ago I got a Kobo Sage.

Same in both Oasis and Sage: - Screen quality - Battery life (in my experience; this doesn't match the actual specs of the products though) - "Waterproof"

Differences: Favoring Kobo Sage: - Screen is a bit bigger without a significant penalty in size and weight - Compatible with a pen and has built-in drawing/OCR/note-taking capabilities - Really easy to borrow eBooks from library via OverDrive - Easier to side-load and sync free eBooks - Slightly cheaper (US)

Favoring Kindle Oasis: - Slightly lighter weight and more compact - More responsive buttons (touch screen is same responsiveness) - Amazon's book purchasing and browsing features are a bit easier to use - Amazon selection is better - "Family" sharing - Built-in free cellular wireless data for Amazon downloads and browsing

I'm happy owning both devices. If I had to choose one or the other, then:

eReader only: I'd choose Kobo only because library borrowing is so much easier. If my local library didn't have OverDrive, then I would choose the Kindle + Amazon Unlimited in a heartbeat.

eInk tablet: Kobo, no question. The Kindle is an eReader. Amazon hasn't made any effort to make it anything more. It simply doesn't make sense to me to compare any eInk Kindle to the Kobo, MatePad, ReMarkable, Boox, etc.

My partner likes eInk tablets for note taking and diagramming, not for e-reading. He has both a ReMarkable 2 and a Boox. The ReMarkable is fine, but He much prefers the Boox because it's easier to use without a subscription. But, now that my partner has used my Kobo Sage, he is unsure whether he'd buy a Boox over a Sage. He says it's a very close call and it would probably come down to price.

I think the writers believe what they're saying. They're just unable to express themselves concisely or think clearly (or both).

It's a lot of words to say something really simple: "minimalist stylized logo with lines and light effects suggesting motion."

I also agree with your implication that whoever wrote this piece of self promotion takes themselves way too seriously. I'd never hire anyone who wastes so much time and so many words on such a simple concept.

A "group of people ... collectively making decisions" doesn't help make sense of anything. A company is itself a group collectively making decisions. Where you draw the "group" line is arbitrary unless you understand the decision-making structure. From the outside you can only make assumptions about which teams or management layers define the "the group."

I also used to believe that personifying companies was silly, but now that I've worked closely with the C-suites of various companies, I've come to understand that companies do have unique cultures and company culture matters. It's the culture that guides decision-making--does customer service and long-term investment matter more than next quarter's goals? Do we want to do thing that's most profitable in the short term because we're cavalier about staying dominant in the long run or are we cautiously managed?

As others have pointed out, MSFT's execs grew up in the Gates-Ballmer culture. MSFT's current actions are consistent with its past actions and attitudes under that regime. I think it's therefore totally legitimate for the parent poster to be concerned about Microsoft, and express that concern by personifying the entity.

The (possibly apocryphal) version I was told includes another layer: The problematic code was part of a last-minute kludge for the Ariane 4. The kludged code violated the Ariane 4's specifications. The Ariane 4 team knew this, but the code "couldn't" be triggered under the Ariane 4's conditions.

A few years later, the code is pulled out for re-use in the Ariane 5. Apparently the kludge wasn't documented and no one bothered to confirm that the Ariane 4 code was actually up to the Ariane 4 spec. Had the Ariane 4 code been up to spec, the code reuse would have been fine.

So true. Today I must explain to my mother that she needs to press a flat picture (not a button) of three horizontal bars in order to pull up a command list. The list won't be sorted by category, but by a designer or developer's perception of which commands are most used.

In the mid 90s, I could walk my 80-something-year-old grandfather through WordPerfect with ease: "File does basic file operations, like save or print. Edit is for editing, like copying and pasting."

Menu bars work because they're a great feature-discovery tool when done right--with verbs that describe the commands, and with functions grouped by category.

"Modern" UIs don't. Try to explain it: "So, the lines are called a hamburger menu, they're supposed to look like a list of commands. And you can press it, even though it's completely flat. Then you need read the list until you find the command you want."

The Mac GUI's great innovation was combining intuitive visual cues with an consistent, unintrusive, and always-on system for feature discovery (the menu bar).

You must not have been around for the 80s and 90s' "desktop wars." Microsoft did everything they could to undermine innovation and they didn't help businesses, they locked them into inferior technology that cost more and undermined productivity. The Microsoft you grew up with was not the Microsoft of Gates and Ballmer. Those were dark years.

That Microsoft created new APIs, runtimes, and frameworks not for technical reasons but in order to lock customers in or disadvantage competitors. That's a big reason why Windows is an unmanageable mess of inconsistent interfaces and DLLs--they were short-term tactics, not well considered approaches.

Apple can absolutely accuse you of pirating something it doesn't want to sell. The real question is whether they will spend the time or money to do anything about it. The answer is complicated. In your scenario, Apple will technically "win" without question. But it might be a phyrric victory because a jury may well agree with your reasoning and refuse to award any substantial damages. In fact, Apple might be shooting itself in the foot if the lack of damages encouraged other would-be "pirates." Apple would also risk bad PR, the Streisand effect, and have to spend a lot of money upfront on attorney fees and costs.

Note that under the law of some countries the right not to distribute a copyrighted work is viewed as a sort of natural or "moral" right to control one's creation. The US doesn't generally take that view; we think of copyright and copyright damages mostly in economic terms. Thus, if your "pirating" isn't actually doing economic harm to the rightsholder, you're somewhat unlikely to owe massive damages. Countries with more moralistic copyright regimes may have stiffer penalties in your scenario.

You might have some pity for Apple in your scenario (I do) because the law strongly encourages rights holders to bring a lawsuit in order to protect their rights. It's a use-it-or-you-might-lose-it-to-some-unknown-extent scenario, and lawyers and companies hate uncertainty. This can lead companies sue for copyright violations even when they don't really care. For example, a book's and publishing house probably don't care about a fanfiction blog. They may even like fanfiction because it's grassroots promotion of their product. But they may still feel forced to sue to stop fanfiction so that their rights aren't questioned the next time they need to sue, e.g., a bootlegger that's passing off unlicensed copies of their product as the real thing on Amazon.

On a more positive note, I like TFA because it highlights a company that did The Right Thing. WordPerfect made its Mac product (WordPerfect 3.5e) freely available when it stopped selling Mac software. WordPerfect 3.5e was released in a responsible way too (IIRC) by creating a special freeware license, which minimized the risk of losing the right to enforce the copyright in the future. Open source would've been even better, but there are many good reasons why businesses wouldn't want to do that where a product integrates third-party-licensed code (WordPerfect 3.5e for the Mac does, according to its "About" screen) or if the product is still being sold commercially on other platforms. The WordPerfect 3.5e approach won't satisfy open source fundamentalists, but it solves the problem you identify, and it does it with minimal legal risk. Keep it in mind and tell your lawyers or managers about it if you're ever faced with the question of what to do with your company's unsupported commercial software.

(Again, not legal advice, random online ramblings, don't listen to me or anyone else who posts on internet fora.)

If that "company" owned the copyright, they would almost certainly win, but damages could be low or negligible negligible as long as the distributor wasn't selling the abandonware and as long as the suit was only for one copyrighted work. Attorneys' fees and costs could be a problem however. (US law, statutory damages, assuming the plaintiff couldn't get the jury outraged about giving away something that would otherwise bit rot.)

I'm a lawyer, but this is my meaningless drivel. It's not legal advice. You shouldn't listen to me. In fact, you shouldn't listen to anyone on HN about legal issues, ever. The copyright discussions here quickly devolve into complete nonsense. I've done software copyright for a long time, but I sometimes have to read posts five times to kind-of-sort-of-think I know what they're trying to argue. And it's almost always wrong.

(grishka, this is not an attack on you at all. Your post is fine.)

That's excellent, and Rust makes perfect sense here. But consider that OP has an important point (though not said very diplomatically): Ada/SPARK has decades of experience and research in safety, especially type safety, which has not received the same level of focus in Rust as memory safety has. In addition, Ada was the vehicle for many years (and still is in some places) for teaching systems safety and mission-critical programming.

You should consider familiarizing yourself with some of that Ada/SPARK research, experience, and pedagogy. The issues you're teaching aren't new, and there's a huge body of knowledge, experience, and anecdotes you may find useful or inspiration.

A couple ideas to get you started-- - "Safe and Secure Software" - https://www.adacore.com/uploads_gems/Ada_Safe_and_Secure_Boo...

- "Safe Dynamic Memory Management in Ada and SPARK." Quote from its first page: "As our main contribution, we show how to adapt the ideas underlying the safe pointers from permission-based languages like Rust or ParaSail, to safely restrict the use of pointers in more traditional imperative languages like Ada." - https://www.adacore.com/uploads/techPapers/Safe-Dynamic-Memo...

- The Ada Information Clearinghouse - https://www.adaic.org/advantages/

Rust is new and important and it's great that it's the focus of your course. But I also think you would do your students a service to show them that they can stand on the shoulders of giants in comp sci just as much as any other discipline. Much as the industry has moved back to what was fundamentally the IBM mainframe remote-system-and-virtual-machines service and licensing model [now we call them clouds, containers, and SaaS subscriptions], Rust is a relatively recent response to the same problems Ada/SPARK have decades of experience in handling. The lessons the industry and comp sci researchers learned 30 or 40 years ago do matter, and they can show us what kinds of solutions work and what may have have unforeseen effects.

The Ada Reference Manual and SPARK are under-appreciated tomes of the world's experience in these issues.

If you've got back up media, you can still get the OS/390 Backup Facility from Arca Noae: https://www.arcanoae.com/shop/s-390-backup-facility/

(Arca Noae is IBM's licensed purveyor of OS/2.)