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Moving to a default patching system is both a bad idea and impractical.

Not only does it raise the risk for a single flaw to cause catastrophe, but it raises the value of a single attack, makes a cross-platform attack feasable, and lowers the cost of attacking any select group of systems. Homogeneity is security disaster.

It's impractical because many systems work in fundamentally different fashions, and would have different needs for a patching system. I can't guess whether you mean all Linuxes, all Unices, or all OSes, because you're defensively vague with "on a larger scale", and if you mean all Linuxes this might maybe be feasable (I don't know the gamut of linux weirdness; I have no idea what Gentoo really does under the hood, for example,) but even for all Unices, things like QNX have demands that make this absolutely unacceptable.

Besides, diversity encourages competition and innovation. If we had One Huge System (tm), it would be excessively difficult to test new ideas. We do not at the moment have a patch distribution system which will just automagically handle a whole LAN, AFAIK; such a thing might never get off the ground if we all lived in the same yellow submarine. (If we do have such a thing, just pick some patch innovation that we don't have yet and substitute; the example isn't the important thing.)

I firmly believe in The Unix Way: small, interlockable pieces representing concrete ideas, which one can string together to achieve goals. You and I might prefer different patching mechanisms; The Unix Way provides for us to choose as we see fit. You might prefer to trust an authority and automatically get patched immediately; I might paranoiacally want the patch downloaded but not instituted until I verified, so that I had time to call the company IS guy and check. Or whatever.

I also believe that The Unix Way is why a platform with such ragged support and meager software library still completely owns the business world despite a decade of effort from the world's largest software-centered marketing company. If you may build your server from pieces, you may control characteristics of it which can be vital for new serving paradigms. This Is Important. (r) Do Not Break It For Convenience, Damnit. (c)(sm)

not an add on that you know to (1) know about

Uh, I don't even have a Linux box, and I found it with a quick google search. Perhaps you should visit to these informative
links.

Science education at the Chicago Public Schools is alive and well. Those interested in tapping into the expertise of our principals and teachers are invited to join our mailing lists. We have lots of experience teaching science education on a budget.

If anything, the script looks vaguely like handwritten gaelic latinoid script (Think book of Kells), but much less ornamented, and more like "day-to-day" writing. This script diverged from latin script in the 0-400A.D. period, but evolved and persisted until the 20th century, when Irish was standardised into contemporary latin script.

Irish dialects make extensive use "shebhus" and "urus" - aspirates and eclipses, indicated by accents in the old scripts - sebhus were usually dots above the letter, but could be diamonds, for example [modern script, just put a h in instead]. I note the presence of diamonds above some letters, and the apple-command-signs could conceivably be uru-forms?

The Irish also have set precedents of inventing their own alphabets: In addition to their own latin variant, they had the ancient ogham script, which is just plain wierd, originally written along corners of rocks and cut wood by notching them. Some people think it's just a A.D.-era encoding of a latin script, but many Irish people think that it's much older, and that just because one finds latin and old-irish inscriptions in Ogham, doesn't mean it was first used for them, since one can quite conceivably phonetically transcribe english into cyrillic or greek or japanese, for example. Plus, ogham looks like random scratches on rocks to people who don't know about it, and plus, most ogham is beleived to have been written on wooden rods- "the poet's slats" in ancient irish literature, which would be long-decayed by now. "Modern" standard Ogham even has a unicode table entry :-)

but all that's well known and would have been eliminated already, plus few of the words look particularly gaelic.

However, there are little known, mainly lost, and very strange "secret" Irishoid languages - e.g. one called "Shelta" that is the language that some members of the "Traveller" / "Tinker" racially distinct population in Ireland once spoke. [the page I've linked to looks to be 7/10ths made-up, I'm afraid, but, being in Ireland, I can confirm that travellers did have their own secret language, that they jealously guarded.] Travellers/Tinkers were somewhat like Romany gypsies in other countries in lifestyle, but unrelated - maybe it's shelta-in-irish-latinate-like-script.

Such people would have been mad into their own astrology, which would probably have the old irish constellations rather than known ones [It is known that there were old Irish traveller constellations, just not what they were :-)] - If one were an Irish tinker, inventing one's own script for your own mainly-illiterate community's language, it would probably end up looking like "hitherto-unknown-language-in-gaelic-like-script." .

Shelta isn't the only "secret" Irish language - Medieval guilds in Irish and Scottish* cities often had their own entire languages to guard their secrets - The dublin stonemason's seems to have been a dialect of Shelta with viking influences, for example.

*Ireland and scotland were pretty much the same until the tenth century - Confusingly, before the tenth century, someone saying "Scotia" probably meant Ireland.

> Don't forget, Harmony is adding the other thing that Qt (and thus, KDE) lacks, real (widget-level) theme support

That's old. Qt 2.0 has great support for widget-level styles (or themes.. whatever). KDE 2.0 will have "plug-n-play" widget styling.

Just for kicks, I did a screenshot with my KBiff app with Qt 2.0. This is what it looks like with a MacOS (Platinum) theme:

http://home.sprintmail.com/~gran roth/kbiff-mac.jpg