Having all numbers be valid in only one way is a great idea. So much that I believe webassembly enforced canonical leb128, at the cost of decoding speed.
And say you have it as part of some other data. If you want to be able to hash it by the raw memory bytes, many different ways to represent a number becomes a problem.
> canonicality matters — for signatures, content-addressing, or any kind of “two implementations must agree on the bytes” property
If you don't do this properly, you end up with things like:
- SAML XSW attack due to XML signature wrapping
- ASN.1 BER/DER signature forgery
- Bitcoin transaction malleability attacks
For the kind of things needed by Firefox, the Linux APIs have been stable for decades.
The problem is not stability, but the fact that there are multiple APIs, and it is unknown which of them will be available on the user system, so a browser may need to support all of them.
For instance, for video decoding on a GPU, the Linux APIs differ depending on the GPU vendor, unless you use Vulkan, but Vulkan video decoding is not available in old computers. Even so, Firefox could have used some higher-level API that takes care of the low-level GPU-dependent details (e.g. ffmpeg).
More baffling is the failure of Firefox to use OpenGL or Vulkan for implementing WebGL, depending on the GPU vendor, because at least the OpenGL API has not changed in a very long time. I have no idea which is the reason (because Firefox does not provide adequate error messages), unless they depend on some vendor-specific OpenGL extensions. I use an NVIDIA GPU, on which I cannot enable WebGL in Firefox, despite the fact that WebGL works fine in Vivaldi and Chromium/Chrome and I use a very great number of OpenGL and Vulkan applications, including some written by myself, all of which work perfectly, with no problems whatsoever.
The usual explanation by Firefox team is that the drivers are not uniformly compliant and/or working well. There had been progress, though.
For your specific system, you can open about:support and search the page for the word "Blocklisted" - that section of the page includes failure codes that can be then passed to web search (or interpreted by name).
I don't know all the details of what works well or not, but the Chrome team logically should have more manpower to implement workarounds for driver problems, and Vivaldi reuses the engine.
Speaking of the other applications though, most of them don't have to use the dma-buf subsystem, to embed hardware rendered content inside a "regular" application. That imposes a certain limitation on the driver capabilities.
The comment is not meant to give you something to buy, it's just proof that it can technically be done, they just don't want to do it for modern flagships.
At what cost though?! And no, I am not talking about money. Any device (and any product really) is a set of tradeoffs.
I like it when different producers select a different subset of priorities for their offer. Competition at work. One of the reasons we witnessed such an awesome evolution in the smartphone market.
I hate it when a bureaucrat dictates a set of demands with absolutely zero regard to the cost or the tradeoffs involved in product decisions and market competition.
> At what cost though?! And no, I am not talking about money. Any device (and any product really) is a set of tradeoffs.
My $200 Moto G3 in 2016 had a removable back cover (admittedly not battery). It was also waterproof (and had a headphone jack.)
The engineering of making things waterproof is in the realm of "A bit more annoying but easily doable if anyone's interested in doing it", not "Doable at the cost of everything else".
> My $200 Moto G3 in 2016 had a removable back cover (admittedly not battery). It was also waterproof (and had a headphone jack.)
It also did diddly squat in the market place and the company producing it ran out of business.
Again, a product is a set of tradeoffs. Those tradeoff include functionality, cost, logistics to build, even marketing and sales. Maximizing a feature to serve a loud minority (headphone jack!) but thus ignoring other features will simply make a product fail in the market place in time...
Not sure what the context or background of that is, but here in India, the G3 sold out shortly after launch.
Per this [1] stat by a Motorola exec too, it did very well.
> Motorola’s General Manager for India, Amit Boni stated at the Moto X Play launch event that the Moto G (3rd Gen) that was launched in July is among the fastest selling smartphones on Flipkart. Its sales mark grossed 140% higher than the Moto G (1st Gen and 2nd Gen).
(And I know that's legitimate because a lot of peers, friends and family, folks on the streets etc had Motorolas.)
> and the company producing it ran out of business.
Unfortunate, yes, but I don't think it was because they made and sold phones that didn't sell. I don't know if it was business mismanagement or what, but it's an unfortunate legacy of one of the most promising brands. Fortunately Lenovo isn't killing the brand, so there's that.
> I hate when a technocrat at a multi-billion dollar company makes those decisions
Really?! So instead of the person hired and paid specifically to select and decide what the product should cost, look and work like, the person whose very pay depends on how well she chooses those product features for you - instead you'd rather have a faceless nameless bureaucrat who never pays the cost of his wrong decisions, who instead gets more power and money the more he panders to the vocal minorities that push populist agendas completely detached from the market place.
> not giving a fuck about any other criteria
That is simply not true, such a company would go out of business fast. As I said before, any product is a set of tradeoffs. Cost (and profit) is just one of the factors. Ignoring the others does not make successful products.
> profit
I love it when a company I buy from is successful. That means it's gonna be around to create more stuff for me to enjoy. It also means the awesome people working there get paid and are successful themselves. Finally, it means that its investors will back up more of this kind of companies that create useful products and services. Profit is great!
Everything you've written can be turned around, swapping companies and authorities. Those working in a public administration are serving the public while those working in a private company are serving themselves (and the shareholders).
>I hate it when a bureaucrat dictates a set of demands with absolutely zero regard to the cost or the tradeoffs involved in product decisions and market competition.
It's because of those "bureaucrats", that car manufacturers were forced to implement catalytic converters and ECUs for emissions controls, and why the air in your city isn't a smog cloud like in the 70s.
I hate it when people assume the environmental and societal problems caused the unregulated free market, are gonna be fixed by the same unregulated free market which only optimizes for profit.
> I like it when different producers select a different subset of priorities for their offer. Competition at work. One of the reasons we witnessed such an awesome evolution in the smartphone market.
>
> I hate it when a bureaucrat dictates a set of demands with absolutely zero regard to the cost or the tradeoffs involved in product decisions and market competition.
I generally agree with that sentiment, except we don't have a vibrant market of many options with many different trade offs. Finding headphone jack, solid reparability, user swappable battery, easily replaceable USB port, and all the other things that one might want is basically impossible. The vast majority of phones are highly unrepairable, have no headphone jack, have everything soldered to a tiny number of internal boards, and are full of anti repair dark patterns.
Better than average phone sold today. The only problem might be lack of android upgrades otherwise it is straight upgrade for most people. This is reason why replaceable battery is important. If you leave IT bubble people happily use ancient phones and do not need upgrades if battery is ok and there is space to save new photos.
So, it's a French trademark. Not a lawyer, but from what I remember trademarks need to be registered in every region you want to enforce them in separately.
If the author of "Notepad++ for Mac" doesn't happen to be French as well, is there anything (legally) preventing them from using this trademark?
"Enforce" yes but the point is that this fork clearly violates broader principles and conventions around respecting clearly active trademarks. Nobody is demanding a lawsuit in French court or any particular legal consequences. But it is totally valid and reasonable for an international company like Cloudflare to crack down on hosting his website: they have French customers.
Also it's really not a finder's-keeper's thing with trademarks and international borders. If someone trademarked Notepad++ in the US and released some janky port with the Notepad++ name, Don Ho could likely still win in US court. Most reasonably knowledgeable US consumers who are plausibly in the market for a Windows text editor are at least superficially familiar with "Notepad++" as the name of a well-regarded software product. I know we travel in certain circles, but there is a reason this guy wants to use "Notepad++" and not "MacnotePlus - A fork of Notepad++ for MacOS." It's a famous name.
That's not correct. You don't have to register a trademark in order for it to be protected, it's just recommended because if you do register it you don't have to separately prove that you have built up brand reputation. That should be pretty easy for a project as old and well-known as this though.
In very, very broad US-centric* strokes: Using a mark in trade is enough to establish a defensible trademark.
Registering a trademark can be useful, but it is also optional. At very least, registration helps make the ownership of the mark easier to discover and this can help everyone start on the right foot.
(* I'm not familiar at all with the laws of France, but that's fine: The alleged violation happened in New York.)
> In very, very broad US-centric* strokes: Using a mark in trade is enough to establish a defensible trademark.
Isn't that only if it's something that would actually qualify for a trademark?
For example, "Car Shop" or probably even "Hamburgers USA" would not qualify for a trademark due to being overly generic/descriptive (in many jurisdictions).
Now in Notepad++'s case the inclusion of the ++ obviously means it would indeed qualify.
Just asking as I'm sure there's people around here with personal experience around the topic, though again it can differ quite a bit by country.
Lots of very plain-looking things work as trademarks. Some obvious examples: AAA, BBB, Target, Just Do It.
There's a lot of nuance in trademarks, including geographical nuance. It's possible for someone to open a small bakery in Boise, Idaho named Bread Stuff and not conflict at all with an existing local bakery named Bread Stuff that operates in Fresno, California.
Having different uses can count, too. Moe's Barber Shop can be a defensible trademark, but that doesn't necessarily conflict at all with Moe's Car Parts across town.
Except: There's also a concept of well-known trademarks, which supercede some of these things. There's a place called Gold and Silver Pawn Shop, in Vegas. There was a time person could build a pawn shop in Somewhere Else Entirely with that same name, and that'd be fine. But now that the Pawn Stars TV series has made the place very famous, it's something that would almost certainly be shown to be a well-known mark if someone were naive enough to try to use that name for their own new pawn shop, today. The Vegas shop would almost certainly win that court battle.
I'd like to think that notepad++ is also a well-known mark by this point.
---
Anyway my intent earlier was just to help promote the concept of registration being optional-but-useful, not to write a book about trademarks. :)
And IANAL. I just got wrapped up in a trademark issue myself nearly 20 years ago, wherein I had been doing nothing wrong by using a name that another small company had been already been using in a very different market segment. Our uses were for very different things.
They subsequently got much bigger and arguably came to be well-known, and they wanted me to stop using that name. I had a valid case: I wasn't infringing when I started.
But I no money and no lawyers, while they had enough money and lawyers that there was no way I'd survive in court.
Hell, there was no way I'd even be able to afford to appear in court; I'd have lost by default and probably been required to pay for the whole mess. I was broke as fuck back then (I still am, but I was then, too).
But what I did have was some time, so I used that time to stuff my brain full of information about how trademarks work -- to prove to myself whether I had a leg to stand on as much as anything else.
I should have just given up. A sane person would have just washed their hands of it all and moved on. But I really liked the name I was using, and I am not always very sane.
It worked out OK, I guess: At the end of that very stressful time, I wound up giving them exactly what they wanted, and they ended up giving me some money in exchange. No courtroom was involved.
And now we're square. (And to be clear: I don't blame them at all for any of this. They're a good company. But even good companies are required to actively defend their trademark. Trademarks are not like patents: You need to use it, and actively defend it, or it is lost.)
> Lots of very plain-looking things work as trademarks. Some obvious examples: AAA, BBB, Target, Just Do It.
These are plain-looking, but none of them are descriptive. Target isn't a target, it's a discount store. If they'd be called "Discount Store" then I believe they'd have trouble getting a trademark. If they'd be called "Retailer" or "Store" or if you'd make a Stripe competitor called "Payment Processor" I don't think you'd stand a chance.
But really the intention of my comment was hoping that someone on HN could answer this:
> Is using a mark in trade enough only if it qualifies as a trademark in the first place?
Copyright and trademark are two entirely different things.
Copyright protects the right of authors to decide how their work is used -- it applies to the content, e.g. the code.
Trademark protects the right of consumers to not be misled by fakes or frauds -- it applies to the names and identifiers that people apply to products and services, e.g the brand name.
Open source copyright licenses allow you to use the source code, but they typically do not grant any trademark rights.
Me still using bigints... Which haven't given me any problems. Wouldn't use it for client generated IDs but that is not what most applications require anyway.
I don't understand how the mapping works. An address has 8 parts and produces 16 words, so each part consists of 2 words. If we take the example 2a02, that gets encoded to "how atop", but I don't see how that text helps me that "how atop" means 2a02? Am I suppose to memorize both? How does that help?
You are not supposed worry about the mapping. You trust the website to help decode it. You just remember the sentence. It's a little like what3words for coordinates.
The rationale being you are more likely to remember grammatical cogent sentence, than a random string of alphanumeric characters. Although I will agree that the generated sentences don't seem easy to remember. So I doubt it's utility.
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