So that's the point; don't bake features into my browser that point me to one company when the whole purpose of a browser in the first place is to be able to visit web pages... like https://protonvpn.com/.
This is about only one thing: money (affiliate sales).
While I'm sure some money exchanged hands, this is obviously not just a marketing move.
We live in a world where VPN are a must if you want to have any expectation of privacy. Giving people easier access to these services is not a bad thing. Mozilla has a privacy-minded vision for the internet. Regardless if you agree with their vision, they are at least following it.
Also, if it's true that Mozilla is auditing ProtonVPN, that is a huge benefit to everyone. The biggest issue with VPNs are you're forced to trust this new company that they'll do as they say with your data (namely that they don't harvest or store any of it). To me, that's a huge thing.
It's also about evangelization, I think. I bet that there is a substantial amount of users of Firefox that do not know what a VPN is, nor how to choose among the very many providers. Without entering in the merit of the choice of provider, I feel it is a good idea, that aligns with the mission of Mozilla and the need of generating income. If I remember correctly, the Mozilla foundation was mainly supported by Google money: having forms of independent income generation is both necessary for any sustainable non-profit, and desirable to maintain, indeed, independence.
The company had bought Ellington, a Django based CMS, but the team basically rewrote the entire thing using multi table inheritance (unintentionally), so everything in the database had two copies, and we had over 70 tables, hundreds of gigabytes, disasters every week and tons of bugs... I discovered this more than a year later and nobody was even aware. Even the DBA wasn’t aware the tables were duplicates.
If Microsoft is doing this selflessly, then why aren’t they simply putting their patents into the public domain?
Consider the open innovation network as a kind of club, with good intentions.
When a company like Microsoft joins it might seem like the pinnacle of success, but with it really means is that the club has become a mafia.
It won’t be long before OIN uses its patent leverage to affect control over the behavior if its members.
Think about it for a minute… Why wouldn’t such a group or simply convince corporations, like Microsoft, to put their patents into the public domain? If you have to join a club to gain access to something, but it’s not really open source and it’s not really some kind of charitable contribution.
Another way of looking at this is, Microsoft has just one goal, being a publicly traded company, which is to increase the share price of its stock… Why are people so stupid always constantly fall for the same tricks, believing that such companies do anything that is actually charitable?
No one suggests they're doing it selflessly. They're doing it because they get more value out of the IP by sharing and collaborating, than they do by litigating. Like so many OSS evangelists have said for the last 20 years: open source isn't about charity; it's actually a better way to develop.
I think you raise a good point about the public domain. Why wouldn't the GNU licenses just force users to put their works into the public domain? Because public domain software isn't copyleft. "Joining a club" in this case is just signing an agreement (for free) that compels open access to your entire patent portfolio. The OIN agreement is a copyleft-style patent club, similar to the GPL. You get unlimited, royalty-free access to my software, but you must agree to offer similar access to everyone, too.
That’s not a valid comparison. If Microsoft was licensing their patents under GNU (if that was possible), we’d be talking about something different entirely, but they’re not actually open sourcing them in any way at all... they’re entering into a contract to trade them like Pokemon cards with a consortium that will actually, eventually become a monopoly. Once they become a monopoly with enough leverage, they will inevitably agree to change their terms to be more hostile to the rest of the world.
Open source software offers usage under some kind of license for essentially nothing in return, not “you can use our software if you make all of your software open sores as well”.
I’m gonna leave this comment here so that I can come back and reference it in an article that all right 10 years from now when everybody is talking about how this consortium effectively took over the world of IP and how it’s too bad nobody could see that snowball when it was near the top of the hill still.
Here’s another thing to consider: given the right terms, which the constituents of this consortium could agree to, this IP monopoly (read: mafia) could even use their IP to collectively sue basically everyone (the cross section of that many patents will overlap with much more IP in the world, creating an economy of scale nobody can compete with).
I just upgraded and honestly FaceID is really nice. I loved TouchID but there were plenty of times it didn't work because my fingers were too moist or whatever. FaceID really doesn't have any issues other than using it too close to your face.
I wish you could teach it multiple faces, because it doesn’t work for me if I have stuff on my head, like a bike helmet and sunglasses, or ski goggles, etc
Huh. My iPhone X works perfectly with FaceID, since iOS11, clipped to my bicycle handlebars. I swipe up, glance down, and it recognizes me + bike helmet + polarized sport sunglasses + blue sky behind me. Seems like that's about as tough a use case as it could get short of a scarf covering my face (in which case I don't really think I want FaceID to work anyway).
Could be that your sunglasses block the faceID scanner. I have some brands of sunglasses that do not work with faceID, but other brands that work perfectly. I imagine it depends on the filter they apply to the lenses.
Would you care to elaborate on what you find objectionable about Face ID? Just like the fingerprint reader, all data is stored on the device secure enclave, and does not leave the phone. And it's been pretty much fast enough for me since the X. (I don't notice much change in speed for the XS but it's probably a bit faster.)
Not GP, but there are three big downgraded use cases:
- Apple Pay ("double-tap the side and look at the phone, then set it on the terminal" is not remotely as fluid as "rest your thumb on the fingerprint reader and touch the phone to the terminal")
- Unlock the phone while it is laying flat on a table/desk in front of you so you can read a notification without picking the phone up and drawing attention that you are doing this.
- Remove the phone from your pocket and press in on the home button with a registered finger so it is fully unlocked and 100% ready to go by the time you can see it in your field of vision.
Overall, however, I am much more bullish on the long term value of Face ID and the phone knowing whether you are paying attention to it or not that I have accepted these downgrades. There are also several upgraded experiences.
"Our code is self-documenting. If you need documentation then the code isn't written well enough"
-Assholes who don't know what it is like to work with mature code bases.
"Our code is self-documenting. If you need documentation then the code isn't written well enough"
-Assholes who don't know what it is like to work with mature code bases.
- People who don't know how to write clean code
- People who think that not only they figured out what 'clean code' even means, but that everyone else will agree, thus single-handedly ending some 50+ years of heated industry-wide debate, numerous billion-dollar attempts by some of the most talented people in the world, and troves of 8-dimensional mental gymnastics about design patterns by way of a $21 ebook, a code review and some blog posts
Not to mention thinking that clean sensible code is always an option. There will always be something. It could be a kernel bug, it could be a quirk of an external library, it could be just to get the bloody thing to link against static libraries, but there will always eventually be an issue that requires a workaround that doesn't make sense without context.
I agreed with this until my current job, when it was stated cheerfully by a guy whose code is so shit lousy that I want to do violence to him (an emotion I haven’t felt in probably ten years).
I think the book _Pragmatic Programmer_ explains the concept of this asshole type of programmer and how to have the same results as him without being an asshole yourself
I hope you are using someone else to judge how clean your code is. (Maybe you are, maybe it is). I have come across very little self documenting code outside of a textbook. Code is a very low level medium. In the meantime a comment can help save a lot of time.
Sorry, parent poster: Gotta agree w/ above comment here. With the minor warning that the unit tests are included in this. In a good environment, I should be able to go to the tests to understand not only WHAT the code is doing but WHY it's doing it. No matter how 'mature' the code base is.
In any mature code, there is going to be unintuitive code that only exists to work around an external issue beyond your control.
Recent example: when you authenticate to OpenSSH running on macOS 10.13 or 10.14, make sure to never attempt keyboard-interactive auth after password auth, or the server will stop responding.
Somewhere you need to write this fact down, so that the next person who comes across your auth code doesn't change the order of authentication methods.
You need to document things like that.
If you have a mature code base, you'll have dozens, or hundreds of these workarounds for all kinds of issues. If you look at the code, it'll seem inefficient. If you don't document why the code looks like it does, then someone will come along (possibly you) a few years in the future and "optimise" that line.
Sure, you could have a unit test that checks whether the workaround is in place. But then you STILL need to document why that unit test is there, or someone will come and consider it pointless and remove it.
or maybe they just didn't write the code? i mean, if it's mature it likely was a result of years of effort and many hands involved. some documentation is always better than none, lack of documentation is either laziness or dogma; neither of which is a valuable mindset when working on a team for a business.
So that's the point; don't bake features into my browser that point me to one company when the whole purpose of a browser in the first place is to be able to visit web pages... like https://protonvpn.com/.
This is about only one thing: money (affiliate sales).