Slashback: Rendering, Munich, Clones

Slashback tonight with a passel of updates, corrections and tangents related to recent Slashdot postings, including GNU/Linux vs. Windows in Munich, Bunnie Huang's book on Xbox hacking, Mozilla's 5-line crash-test, and (sigh) yet another SCO note, but at least it's one to smile at. Read on for the details.

How to impress users. chjones writes "The bug that crashes Mozilla with simple HTML has been fixed in the latest nightly build. This was previously mentioned in a Slashback in response to a similar bug in Internet Explorer. No nightly build of IE appears to be available."

Quiet but sterile, or silent and deadly? JerryKnight writes "With the wider availability of TouchStream keyboards, such as at ThinkGeek, I wonder if these great devices are used by anyone else besides me. Since the last story over a year ago, Fingerworks has made quite a few improvements, such as many firmware upgrades and the (currently still Beta) Gesture Editor. Does anyone else find the gesture/mouse benefits to outweigh the headache of learning zero-force typing?"

Would you like to play a game? bigattichouse writes "When I read the piece on using gaming to keep your brain moving, it reminded me of several articles on coders needing 'ramp-up' time to get into coding. I put together a small freeware game PortaLogica as a preliminary attempt to create a game that would help stimulate coding-related-thought. The game is played using schematic logic gates, and trying to get inputs to match outputs. I'd love to flesh it out a bit more (like writing a KDE or Gnome version)..."

Offically official. Alexander Schatten writes "Although Steve Ballmer interrupted his holiday to try to change the decision of the Munich politicians, after some weeks of discussion Munich decided today to change all 14.000 PCs, Notebooks to Linux. Servers as well as Clients!

One of the main reasons was to avoid a too close binding to specific vendors. A wise decision, one will confirm, especially as Munich is one of the biggest cities in Germany and might be an example for other cities. For more details see: SuSE or heise.de (both in German)"

Buy it while it's legal. An anonymous reader writes "Remember Bunnie Huang? He's the MIT student who first hacked the Xbox. He wrote a book that was supposed to be published by a well-known publisher, but the publisher chickened out, afraid of Microsoft's wrath. Bunnie isn't so scared, however. He's publishing the book himself. The book, "Hacking the Xbox," can be purchased from his website. I just saw Bunnie on TechTV, and he's offering a 20 percent discount to TechTV viewers (Scroll to bottom of article to see the coupon code)."

The famous Finnish art of the insult. scotch51 writes "I followed the links to the Raelians website on Friday after ./ reported Linus Torvalds comparing the amazing SCO lawsuit to the Raelians claims of amazing (bio)technological achievements. Today, wanting to show a friend the Raelians rather pretty twist on the Star of David for their own logo, I see that all pages I'd visited yesterday report blank. "Reveal codes" on every page I visited yesterday reveals only: html body /body /html. Guess that's one way to deal with being slashdotted, or were they perhaps hacked?"

Comments

wget -r http://www.sco.com/ (FP)

[Anonymous Coward]

It's time for sco to feel the PAIN!

Re:wget -r http://www.sco.com/ (FP)

[Phleg]

This is silly and sophomoric. You should be ashamed.

I mean, for god's sakes you forgot the recycling for loop.

Not an admin ?

[IanBevan]

No nightly build of IE appears to be available

Only the near-daily security updates.

Munich

[Gortbusters.org]

No suprise they choose SuSE... SuSE just dominates the market place over there with Mandrake coming in second. Alas, RedHat is largely US based.

Re:Munich

[captain_craptacular]

Yeah, buying locally is a terrible idea. We would all be much better of if everyone mail-ordered everything from Taiwan. Money wants to be free and LOVES to travel!

Re:Munich

[dJCL]

Bit it is not jingoism, the reports out there state that they had a scoring system, max 10000 and linux got mid 6K area, windows got lower 5K area, so by thier testing and other procedures, they determined that linux would be the best option for them... This is how every company would love to do it, make a true decision based on business needs. and if they did, some would go MS, some would go Linux, but more people would be happy.

Enjoy.

Not quite a true victory in munich

[Bold Marauder]

While I'm glad to see M$ go down and lose revenue just as much as anyone else, I really feel that we should be more focused on corporate adaptation of Linux in Germany, instead of trying to win the GNU/M$ battle through government intervention.

Re:Not quite a true victory in munich

[birdman666]

Governments are basically corporations nowadays anyway, at least they're being run like them. And if the government can run on something other than Microsoft, other corporations may take notice and give it a shot.

Re:Not quite a true victory in munich

[Anonymous Coward]

To get corporations to adopt it, you need to make one of the biggest customers use it. If the government is using Linux with say OpenOffice and they will only deal with companies whose files they can read, well, the companies will either switch to OO or make sure that OO can read their documents.

Re:Not quite a true victory in munich

[Jason Earl]

Actually government adoption of Free Software makes a lot of sense. After all, the German government gets to tax the consultants that set up and customize their Linux systems, while licensing fees end up in the U.S. For government entities building the local economy is an important consideration. You don't build the local economy by sending millions to Redmond Washington (unless, of course, you live in Redmond).

Also, governments are really the only entity that can mandate document formats. It doesn't matter how big your company is, if the government wants their information in OpenOffice format you don't send them an MS Word document.

Most importantly, however, is the fact that a lot of the really large computer installations (where Linux has a definite advantage) are government owned. For small businesses Linux steeper learning curve works against it. In large organizations the openness, flexibility, and scriptability of Linux make it very cost effective to administer.

Re:Not quite a true victory in munich

[Miguel de Icaza]

Linux on the enterprise (and government) desktop has only just begun.It is therefore difficult to see the trend if you are unaware what the big conversion projects are doing. In this multi-billion contract with the German government IBM will not only be converting all their desktops to SUSE-Linux but they are also charged with developing all the applications necessary, porting many internal office applications based on M$ access, eXcel, VB, SQLserver to KDE/java/MySQL/DB2 (Maybe the German government has come to the KDE teams rescue with much needed cash injection just in time!). This is why many others are sitting on the fence, they say "Oh, great, it has started, let's get in line to be at the counter when the goods are becoming available".

It took the PC about 15 years to take the entreprise.Things like that don't happen overnight. But there is always a point when the critical mass has been reached and from that point on the trend cannot be stopped anymore. Linux is well positioned to reach that critical mass within a few years if ibm/Suse/kde continue to follow their roadmaps as they have done so far.

I understand oh great one

[djupedal]

must....render....munich....clones

the pain of input devices

[lingqi]

Does anyone else find the gesture/mouse benefits to outweigh the headache of learning zero-force typing?

no, I feel the pain for the over 300 dollars deficit in my wallet for such a keyboard.

Seriously though - I would LOVE to try one, but affordability is definitely not one of its good traits. Anybody knows a place where you can rent one for a week? in japan, possibly?

otoh, while not having had any touchstream experience, I can speak from the perspective of a dvorak user - which is the pain of having to resort back to qwerty anywhere else. Not so much a problem for me now, but if you work in IT and needs to troubleshoot people's computers - forget it. (I read stuff like "after you learn dvorak you can revert back to qwerty and be fluent in both" which I am finding out is total bullshit - as much as I like the dvorak layout - switching to qwerty on the fly is not easy)

Not to mention in places such as BIOS and the such, you don't even have the OPTION to configure a dvorak keyboard...

Similar things I predict for touchstream users - you will go to another computer and wave your hand jedi-like and nothing happens and it will cause a ton of frustration. Heck, just imagine going between work and home. Having big trouble affording one, No way in a billion years I can afford two... I will wait for neurological interfaces instead - well, if we are not already batteries / control modules inside the matrix already.

Re:the pain of input devices

[phraktyl]

I used a dvorak layout for about a week, and was starting to get decent at it, and then tried to edit something in vi. Have you ever tried to move around using H, J, K and L in a dvorak layout?!

It was either dvorak or vi, and vi won by a landslide.

Do not /. Bugzilla...

[$$$$$exyGal]

Here's the Bugzilla text:
===

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4a) Gecko/20030401
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4a) Gecko/20030401

Even though the given testcase might be an abusive use of CSS and as of that to
be considered invalid html the browser crashes on loading this page.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. load the testcase

Actual Results:
crash

Expected Results:
rendered the page - at least somehow ;)

<html>
<body>
<fieldset style="position:fixed;">
<legend class="bblack14">Crash test</legend>
hello world content
</fieldset>
</body>
</html>

==
The bug is fixed in the nightly build.

Re:Zero-force typing?

[Mononoke]

So, what, that means I just have to think about it and the letters appear?

Zero-Force that is not. The Force that is, young one.

Re:Anyone else remember this?

[catsidhe]

I actually own a copy of Let's Welcome Our Fathers from Space, which has the original star-of-david/swastika logo on the front cover.

There is a section in the introduction trying to justify this (IIRC, he claimed that both were solar symbols, and the swastika was just another symbol before Herr Hitler anyway, and everyone used it, and...) He is right in the technical sense, about the fylfot and its solar symbolism and ubiquity, but the German National Socialists have ruined it for everyone for quite a long time to come.

Alas RedHat indeed.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Alas, RedHat is largely US based.

Alas, Redhat indeed.

As far as I'm concerned RedHat is not ready for prime time - and WON'T be until:

1) Their prepaid included-with-the-expensive-box support continues until your first install is up on the net or LAN (and preferably with a built-from-source kernel), rather than stopping when you first get a login screen.

2) Their quickstart manual includes a clear description (accessable to neophytes - and keystroke-by-keystroke again) of both
* how to install the system (Of particular interest as of 6.x: Tell 'em how to make sane choices for the size of the partitions.) and
* how to obtain and install security upgrades.

3) Their install documentation includes a step-by-step, keystroke-by-kestroke recipe for going:
* from a blank computer and their CDROMs,
* through an intermediate system installed from the CDROM image
* To the SAME system but with the kernel built from the supplied sources.

4) Their in-depth manual includes a section giving a COMPLETE list of the configuration files twiddled by each of the functions of each of the graphic-interface admin tools. (And don't tell me to read the source or look it up on the net. You're a packager. Package it already.)

5) Their quickstart manual tells me how to adjust the screen parameters. (And DON'T tell me to go figure out X. Give a recipe.)

C'mon, guys! Get a tech writer and assign him/her the task with 2), 3), 4), and 5) as the goals.

(And while we're at it, the Gnome and/or KDE crews really ought to do a desktop tool, on the model of Apples', for tuning the screen, and RedHat should have it in the default menus.)

"Reveal codes"

[matthewn]

"Reveal codes" on every page I visited yesterday reveals only: html body /body /html.

Reveal codes? What, we're surfing the web with WordPerfect here?

there is no such thing as "zero-force typing"

[73939133]

Zero force typing is a myth. When you type, whether on a flat surface or a keyboard, your fingers at some point need to change directions (move up/down, etc.). The forces to bring that about either come from your own muscles or from the keyboard.

Normal keyboards are carefully designed to cushion the strike and let you recover energy to make your finger go up again after going down. That's what all those little springs, levers, and rubber pads are for in your keyboard. A flat surface has none of those.

The difference is similar to jumping barefoot on concrete vs. jumping barefoot on a trampoline. Which would you rather do? Keyboards basically give you a carefully designed trampoline for each finger, and that's good.