mjw1007

81 ms·

841.
by mjw1007 9y ago
IE6 was released about the same time as Mozilla 0.9.3. I think Mozilla was already ahead in technical terms at that point. Certainly it had better CSS support, and on my machine it crashed less. The important difference was a matter of supp
842.
by mjw1007 9y ago
True. I think we can say that Gecko ended up technically better than incremental changes to Internet Explorer, which I think was starting off from a more maintainable codebase than Netscape 4. That's hardly conclusive but it's som
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by mjw1007 9y ago
Joel is making two separate claims there, though he doesn't cleanly distinguish them. One is that rewriting from scratch is going to give you a worse result than incremental change from a technical point of view (the « absolutely no re
844.
by mjw1007 9y ago
It's worth something if it was only losing money because it couldn't afford to service its debt.
845.
by mjw1007 9y ago
Does anyone know if the amount they'll be paying in Microsoft licensing is (or will be) public? It would be interesting to see if they're getting an unusually good deal. Though I suppose there might be ways to hide that if they wa
846.
by mjw1007 9y ago
There's an index, usually a separate one for command-line options. For example in the sed info pages it's under "Command and Option Index" at the bottom of the top-level menu. And, at least in the emacs viewer, there&#x2
847.
by mjw1007 9y ago
Note that the GNU ls manpage is just `ls --help` in manpage format, with a "SEE ALSO" section at the bottom which tells you where the real documentation is.
848.
by mjw1007 9y ago
As far as the content and organisation goes, they're basically doing everything right that manpages do wrong. They separate tutorial and reference documentation, don't collapse under their own weight when they get large, and have
849.
by mjw1007 9y ago
Note that the commonly-used GNU implementations of tar and find both have info documentation which is much better than the manpages.
850.
by mjw1007 9y ago
Web browsers are, for practical purposes, exposed to the public. Linux doesn't run only on servers.
851.
by mjw1007 9y ago
I think the impressive thing here is how quickly both upstream and the distros have fixed this once the problem was reported (even though the report was via an unofficial channel).
852.
by mjw1007 9y ago
I expect they mean EMIB halves the amount of power used for communicating between the CPU part and the GPU part.
853.
by mjw1007 9y ago
Supplying stuff "for free" (particularly as part of a bundle with expensive stuff that you have a monopoly on) to undermine your competitors is a pretty central example of the sort of behaviour that anti-trust law is there to prev
854.
by mjw1007 9y ago
I agree, that's what makes the difference. Not just that standardised forms appear, but that Chrome does switch to them. Contrast CSS, where Microsoft participated in the design (while Netscape tried to push their own different thing)
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by mjw1007 9y ago
Bundled Internet Explorer was particularly troubling because they were promoting ActiveX as the way to provide interactive content and otherwise extend the browser, and ActiveX was very closely tied to the Windows API (so that it would be i
856.
by mjw1007 9y ago
One thing that stands out in this story is that we don't have an authenticated email system that most people are willing to use, and this causes real problems.
857.
by mjw1007 9y ago
I presume they want the readers to draw the inference that if someone is going to the effort of creating multiple layers of trusts and corporations in different secrecy jurisdictions then something illegitimate is going on. To be honest, I
858.
by mjw1007 9y ago
Right, he isn't really talking about changing the way we assign version numbers to software projects. Rather he's talking (in a rather confusing way) about changing the way we convert names-and-version-numbers into identifiers use
859.
by mjw1007 9y ago
That's a splendidly clear demonstration of the double standard: He believes that when people are trying to minimise their taxes, the only question is whether what they do is legal; "we" are supposed not to disapprove so long
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by mjw1007 9y ago
I suppose it's easier to pressure governments to change what's going on when we have journalists willing to tell us what's going on. When it comes to reporting information obtained from "secrecy jurisdictions", I th
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by mjw1007 9y ago
4.13 (released this September) added the dm-zoned device-mapper target, which presents an SMR drive as if it was a normal block device. I suppose what it does is similar to what drive-managed SMR drives do internally.
862.
by mjw1007 9y ago
There's some discussion at https://lwn.net/Articles/738046/#Comments . One angle: a few weeks ago SFLC announced that it's starting a programme to support individual free software projects creating their
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by mjw1007 9y ago
As I understand it they had a contract with Levandowski saying that disputes had to be settled by arbitration.
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by mjw1007 9y ago
Thanks, that's good to know. So a word-processor-like application might try implementing its own simple global lock (eg with a lock file) and then tell SQLite to use nolock=1. I'm not sure I'd feel very comfortable doing that
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by mjw1007 9y ago
Oh. As it happens, I wasn't making an argument. I was answering nikbackm's question.
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by mjw1007 9y ago
Then you lose many of the advantages being touted in the « What If OpenDocument Used SQLite? » page that we're discussing. Consider the following paragraph: « Hence, "File/Save" takes longer than it ought, especially on
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by mjw1007 9y ago
They might well lead to file corruption if two people try to save the same file at once. But that tends not to matter in practice for applications like word processors (which often want to implement their own system to stop two people openi
868.
by mjw1007 9y ago
For me, the biggest reason not to do this sort of thing is that SQLite still often refuses to work over network filesystems. I appreciate that this is because the authors are being careful about possible corruption when locking isn't w
869.
by mjw1007 9y ago
Linux delegated its user-facing documentation to third parties pretty much from the beginning. Even for those things which have documentation in Documentation/, there is no formal or informal rule that if you make a change which causes
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by mjw1007 9y ago
That wasn't there half an hour ago :-). That LWN article was from June 2017 and 4.10 was released in February, so I think that means these tests predate any of the changes it discusses.

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