johnfernow

The Java language specification is open and there are multiple implementations. OpenJDK is the official open-source reference implementation, and many of the alternative implementations pull from upstream, but OpenJ9 is a different JVM implementation (though does currently use OpenJDK's class libraries to form a complete JDK.)

Before Microsoft opened-up C#, Mono was a completely independent alternative implementation.

Python has CPython (reference open source implementation), but also PyPy, MicroPython and several others.

exFAT is widely used but it not being journaled has led to so many thousands (if not more) people losing tons of data, many of which wouldn't have lost so much data had they used a journaled filesystem (or even one with redundant file tables.)

If you need to connect a portable drive to machines of different OS's, there is no safe filesystem that supports read and write on both Windows and MacOS.

Alternatively, cloud storage works until the files are larger than the space you have left on Drive/Dropbox/OneDrive/etc., and local network sharing (on certain networks at least) is more complicated than what the average user is willing to put up with. In practice, many use USB flash drives or external HDDs/SSDs with exFAT. Yeah, people should have more than one backup, but we know in the real world that's not what many do. That requires them spending more time (e.g. configuring local network sharing or setting up an old machine lying around to be a NAS) or money (more on cloud storage.) In practice, having a cross-platform, journaled filesystem would lead to a lot less data loss.

Aside from exFAT, the only alternative with native cross-platform R/W capability is FAT32, but while it has a redundant file allocation table (unlike exFAT), it has a max file size of 4GB, which limits its usefulness for many workflows.

I agree with you. To be fair though, the concept likely seemed more reasonable in 1999. Hardware, browsers, and websites (and their front- and back-end services) were all less complex back then. Also less bloat. Not that things were more secure, but a popular tool may have had more meaningful review.

At times, complexity is worth the trade-offs. Modern C++ compilers are more complex than ones in the 80s and 90s, but the assembly code they generate runs much faster. Rust is complex but provides massive security benefits while maintaining great performance.

At times though, stuff is just bloated or poorly designed.

But it's not always clear how to intelligently design a project. If you add too many features to a single large project, it becomes unwieldy to maintain that large project, and the harder it is to audit this critical piece of infrastructure. Yet, if you don't add enough features, people will use packages from random devs, risking their own security, while harming the maintainability of their own project.

I don't know how we solve that problem. Alternatively, you could ask devs to reinvent the wheel and write a lot more code on their own (which they probably won't, either because they don't want to, or because the employer requires a solution on too short of a timeline to do so), but that could also jeopardize security. Many if not most web devs have to deal with authentication and encryption, both of which (the overwhelming majority) very much should not do on their own. Good luck asking a junior dev to correctly implement AES-256 encryption (or something equivalent or better) on their own without using existing libraries.

The answer is almost certainly some kind of mix, but it's not clear what exactly that should look like.

I agree with you: they'd rather not. If Google's Android became closed source to the public, but Google gave Samsung and other OEMs the right to modify it (including a hard fork later on if they desired), then I agree with you that they'd almost certainly continue with Google's Android — they'd lose nothing and eliminate future competitors.

My comment was in part addressing the higher up comments in the thread stating OEMs couldn't do a hard fork. My thoughts are that they have the marketshare that if Google's terms were bad enough, they could. They'd love to take some of the Play Store revenue, but currently dropping the Play Store would tank hardware sales as competitors would keep it. But if Google's terms were to get bad enough that multiple OEMs wanted to hard fork, that calculation could change. I don't foresee Google ever putting forth that bad of terms though, in part because of the option to hard fork.

Right, but if Google's Android becomes closed source and a well-funded FOSS fork becomes available, that changes the situation. If Samsung, Xiaomi, Motorola, HONOR, OPPO, etc. all agree to use a new FOSS fork as their base, well Google's new closed-source Android becomes irrelevant. Samsung alone is large enough to be able to maintain a fork of Android, and a large enough percentage of the smartphone market that whatever OS it's running will be supported by banking apps.

Some fair points. Courts have ruled Congress can make laws concerning foreign residents that would be unconstitutional if applied to domestic residents and citizens. They generally can't deny someone their Constitutional rights once already inside the US though. But since deportation isn't a criminal conviction (and rejection at the border especially isn't), it's conceivable that they could deny someone entry for a variety of reasons.

So perhaps not a violation of the Constitution. Though if the scientist's claims that he was denied entry because he expressed a personal opinion on the Trump administration's research policy, then it certainly violates the spirit of the First Amendment, and much of what the government claims it stands for. Is it legal? Perhaps. Will it cause long-standing damage to US soft-power and the ability of US organizations to recruit world-class scientists? Quite possibly.

> First Amendment protections are only available for U.S. citizens and to a lesser extent to permanent residents

Nowhere in the First Amendment, or anywhere in the Bill of Rights (or later amendments), does it state, or even imply, that the First Amendment is only applicable to US citizens and permanent residents. SCOTUS has repeatedly interpreted the First Amendment's protections as extending beyond just citizens and permanent residents in matters of freedom of speech and religion. While some rights, such as voting, are restricted to citizens, the First Amendment's protections apply to anyone within the U.S. jurisdiction, regardless of citizenship status.

The amendment is short and clear: "Amendment I: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Even if one argued "the people" refers only to U.S. Citizens (on what basis, who knows), that would only restrict assembly and petitions. The first part is unambiguously comprehensive and clear: "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" (emphasis added by me.)

Having a browser written entirely (or mostly) in a memory safe language.

LadyBird is now using some Swift, but most of the code is still C++. The browser, while extremely impressive (and I’m very thankful it exists), has a ways to go before it’s a true replacement for Chromium/Blink, Firefox/Gecko or Safari/WebKit, and rewriting all the existing code in Swift would be a massive undertaking.

Chromium and Firefox also use some Rust, but re-writing those browsers entirely in it would be an even larger undertaking.

In contrast, a simpler browser spec would make it far easier to create a brand new browser in a memory safe language. Not only would this massively improve security on all operating systems as the browser is a huge vector for exploits, it’d also allow for the creation of new, more secure operating systems. Currently, arguably the biggest blocker for using something like RedoxOS (an OS written in Rust) is that it doesn’t have a web browser that can actually work for a lot of the web. But if the web browser spec were simpler, it’d be much easier to create one and then use that OS.

Obviously we can’t go back in time and make a simpler web-spec, and removing features is a terrible idea as it’d break existing websites. I do think, though, that it’s fair to think very hard before adding new features. I think a complete feature freeze would be overkill — some new features could legitimately make web development simpler and cleaner for many webdevs. I do think there needs to be some thought as to what the end-goal for web browsers is. Is there one? Or will we forever continue to add new features at the current pace? If so, the hopes of building a new, more secure browser are dim. And personally I’d prefer a more secure browser to one with more features.

As a comparison, C++ has been adding plenty of new features, but nearly no devs are aware of the full feature set, and despite the goal of making things simpler, I think many devs are as lost as ever with it, as they still have to interface with code written in old and different manners. On the web dev side, some JS and CSS features do legitimately simplify development and make things easier, but I think it’s fair to say that’s not the case for all new features added.

There is no comparable alternative to the Internet Archive though. They've gotten involved in several lawsuits and their future is far from guaranteed. They're an incredibly important organization, but I think it's too important of a project to be limited to one organization, or even one country or region of the earth. A solar flare could destroy a lot of history.

I don't know that the economics of having multiple Internet Archive-like organizations is currently feasible (I imagine getting funding for one of them is hard enough), but even a partial offline mirror hosted someplace else would be nice. Maybe to save space they could take the oldest version of a page, the newest, and the midmost version timewise, discarding all other versions. They could also heavily compress images, video and audio to save storage space (would increase processing costs, but if willing to throw out quality, could compress quickly and still save a bunch of space. E.g. downscale all videos to 480p and use veryfast preset and CRF 28 with ffmpeg. Even 240p is a lot better than nothing. A pixelated form of history is better than no history.)

Right, archive.org is very useful if you have a URL, but if you're searching for a question that was answered in a forum, and that forum post no longer exists and no longer shows up in search results, then it's effectively undiscoverable as far as I'm aware.

It amazes me how companies will have free volunteers help people to use their (often expensive) paid subscription products, and then delete all that info those volunteers wrote up. Don't they want people to use their products?! They're less likely to renew their subscription if they struggle or are unable to use the product for their particular use case.

Unaffiliated forums not ran by the company are better in that the company can't decide to just delete all old posts one day (and while the owner could, certain types of unaffiliated forums are usually a bit easier to clone and republish.) The downside is you don't get assistance from people who work for that company, but often you rarely get that in official forums. The usual reason to use official forums is just that they have significantly more users asking and answering questions than unofficial ones.

Sure, but you can't search for the forum pages on archive.org as far as I'm aware (or at least as easily as searching on Autodesk's website or Google/Bing/etc.) For the time being, old forum posts will likely still show up in search engine search results, and you can take those URLs and look them up on archive.org.

Eventually though they'll likely no longer show up whenever the search engine's crawlers revisit and it's a redirect, in which case the pages are undiscoverable.