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Slashback: KDE, Tsunami Hacker, and Image Bugs
We Slashback, to provide updates to three recent stories. All happy news, for once. JoaoPinheiro writes "After last week's reports that Novell plans not to ship the KDE desktop on Novell and SUSE Enterprise products, the company got lots of feedback from its customers. Novell has listened to them and reconsidered its desktop strategy." Meanwhile, in the employment sector, sebFlyte writes "Daniel Cuthbert, recently a high-profile victim of the UK's outdated cybercrime laws, has found a job in the security industry." Finally, one less thing to worry about, as gUnit writes "eWeek is reporting that virus researchers at Trend Micro jumped the gun with a warning that a Trojan in the wild was capable of exploiting newly patched Windows security flaws. Just 24 hours after announcing the discovery of a proof-of-concept Trojan that supposedly exploits a trio of image-rendering vulnerabilities patched by Microsoft, Trend Micro is retreating from that claim and offering up a batch of excuses."
The real question isn't whether KDE will be included on SuSE Linux, or supported by Novell. The real question is how much money is Novell willing to spend *developing* KDE.
I still dont get this.
../../../ to the URL in an attempt to access the site's higher directories -- an action that triggered an alarm.
>To check, he added
So are we to believe that simple act resulted in a criminal conviction? Really?
Surely there is more to it than that.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
That is generally my take on it too. That KDE is more polished and more eye-candyish but I think the Gnome crew excels at user-friendliness. Time and again, I have tried to find how to do something in KDE and had trouble, but in Gnome it just seems more like Windows. Not necessarily better but at least more familiar.
The fact that they have Gnome developers in house would certainly help in integrating their apps and utils with Gnome but another good reason for doing so is that other enterprise players are already there. (Redhat/Solaris) So it's actually more of a convergence, and the standardization should result in less uncertainty in the minds of potential adopters.
By standardizing on a default management interface and adhering to LSB 3.0, the enterprise developers are cooperating in a way that should benefit all of them by capturing mindshare and marketshare.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
OSS: The only community in which you can get roasted for trying to play nice when people ask you to.
-- sigs cause cancer.
"Flip-flopping" is a very stupid term, and even stupider when used as an insult.
Novell made what amounted to a mistake in the eyes of many of their users, and such users let Novell know that. So Novell did the responsible thing, listened to their users, and cleared up the problem. That's not a bad thing. They were being responsive to their customers needs.
Indeed, it's very good when people go back and fix a mistake that they made. It's called being responsible.
However, I do agree with you about the GNOME file selector being quite unusable. It is what keeps me from using Firefox.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
A judge should not react like an uneducated person. The act and circumstances are what count, not the feelings of a judge.
The judge said he would normally be inclined to leniency but that lying to the police meant that, when considering degree of intent, thus severity of the act, thus appropriate severity of the punishment, it implied Cuthbert knew what he was doing was wrong (as, if he felt he was in the right, why would he feel the need to lie?) and did it anyway.
The judge didn't act because he was in a bad mood. He weighed the factors he had available to consider Cuthbert's degree of guilt and found his lying to imply more guilt.
Plus, whether we like it or not, judges do go a lot harder on people who are proved to lie to the police, resist arrest, lie in court, etc., making examples of them to attempt to discourage such acts by others.
I've been, arguably, in that sort of a position. Upon getting a speeding ticket, I didn't bitch about how unfair it was, how the cop came up behind me in the dark, rode my ass until I accelerated to get out of his way, etc. I didn't try lying about what speed I was doing, I didn't try claiming his detection gear was faulty and demand a copy of the source code. I knew I was in the wrong, I admitted it, he wrote my speed down as lower than I admitted to to cut me a break, I got the negligible fine, I got on with my life.
Now, yes, I could have raced for my freedom until he managed to force me to stop. I could have lied about the speed I was doing. I could have been rude and surly. But, had I pulled all of that, I would have likely had him decide to cite me for my missing front plate, my empty wiper bottles, give me a breath test for good measure, take me in until he could verify the provisional license the DMV has issued for stupid reasons, etc. I'd have likely ended up with several hundred dollars of fines and rubber gloves in uncomfortable places.
Now, yes, we could all end up in his position tomorrow. And yes, they may be stupid laws. Yes, they may have more powers than they should. But it doesn't change the fact that most people, and this judge was one - just like the cop was in my case, are basically decent enough people who just want to do their jobs and give the honestly contrite as minor a slap on the wrist as possible whether the system is abusable or not. But, if you act like a jerk, try lying to them, treat them like idiots, then, yeah, they're likely to look for ways to screw you back.
The system's not perfect. But you can make it better or worse through your actions. Through his deliberate lying, Cuthbert made his situation much worse when coming in front of an otherwise apparently reasonable judge who would have let him off.
If people are to respect the law, perhaps the law should begin by respecting the people.
Well, I guess the proof is in the pudding, as they say. TrollTech survive by selling licenses for their toolkit, obviously. There are literally hundreds of apps out there written using it (Photoshop CS, for example). Contrary to your opinion, commercial developers love Qt. No offense, but small developers like you just don't write the big apps that sell. If you made money from your apps, a Qt license would be no big deal. Sorry. (Yes, I'm a C++ developer of many years, and I've worked for big companies and small - right now, I'm in a 16 person startup. I know the value of time to market and working with the best tools.)
I'd like to hear about commercial apps written with gtk. Can you name any? I can't.
OK, this is a shameless troll but I'm really peeved by the GTK file selector and the way it hides what directory you're in unless you press this tiny little arrow. Is that going to confuse people or what?
It's bad enough having Firefox and Gimp rendered unusable (shameless exageration) in this way let alone a whole suit of applications.
KDE makes much more sense to me (shameless flamebait) and I hope there is another German distro that can become what Suse was once to fill the void that has been left by the "restructuring". All the times I've seen a US corporation take over a European company (shameless generalisation) they have just sabotaged it. I used to work for a European Harmen pro-audio company before the writing was on the wall what they wanted to do with it.
See my point? It didn't take long for a Trolltech apologist to squirm out of the woodwork.
TrollTech survive by selling licenses for their toolkit, obviously. There are literally hundreds of apps out there written using it (Photoshop CS, for example).
So.. why can I not buy a Linux version of Photoshop? What's the point crippling KDE (and hence Linux) with Qt - IF NOBODY USES IT FOR COMMERCIAL APPS ON LINUX?
If you made money from your apps, a Qt license would be no big deal. Sorry.
So Linux development has been hijacked by people that can afford $6600 toolkits? If it's turning into a closed-ended expensive solution like Solaris or NeXT, Linux is dead for the consumer desktop before it got started.
right now, I'm in a 16 person startup. I know the value of time to market and working with the best tools.
Are you using Qt? (you didn't actually say)
If no, have you asked your money people about buying 16 licences of a $6600 library that might save a little bit of time. I would be interested in their reaction. And if it saves you theoretical month's worth of work.. you're being paid too much.
And if time to market and quality of tools are the most important aspects, why are you not using either Microsoft Visual C# or Borland Delphi / C++ Builder?
> If you're a "Linux enthusiast", you're using a "free" desktop to prevent paying fees to the likes of Microsoft.
If you are really a "Free Linux desktop enthusiast" why would you want to see proprietary applications (for which you likely have to pay) at all? Shouldn't everything rather be free software? Or at least those companies wanting to write closed-source applications should give something back (like via paying Qt licenses)?
And are you talking about users paying "fees" to Trolltech or developers (of million dollar rich companies)?
KDE == Proprietary and expensive
Your subject is misleading. KDE is not proprietary. It can be expensive though, if you wish to develop proprietary software.
One important thing to consider is that Qt is so darn good. People complain about programming in Gtk. No one complains about programming in Qt. If your employer buys you Qt to develop with, then you're a lucky bastard. The only thing people complain about with Qt is the commercial license cost. In some ways, this reminds me of Apple: pricey, but there are people out there that will pay that price. This is why a lot more "high end" apps are written in Qt (like Pixar's tools, for example).
That said, this is further complicated by the fact that Qt is also free as in GPL. For open source developers, the choice between Gtk and Qt is simple, and this is why KDE thrives. Granted, Gtk is used by a lot of open source developers, but I'd say this is mostly due to preference of the C progamming language. It is the KDE crew that loves what they are doing, and they make faster progress.
You wrote: If you're a "Linux enthusiast", you're using a "free" desktop to prevent paying fees to the likes of Microsoft. But with Qt, you are encouraging people to pay Trolltech.
Maybe so, but you have to admit it is a very different situation. I like that Trolltech gets paid. They give us free stuff. Free as in GPL. That's like corporate suicide. Nobody gives their stuff away like that. Fortunately, here we have a business model that allows it to happen. In fact, it turns the whole system upside down. When you pay Microsoft, you encourage further closed source development. When you pay Trolltech, you are sponsoring open source development. Qt would not be as good as it is today without this funding.
It might be that Qt is "hurting Linux" in some way, as you say. But in my opinion I don't think we'd even be talking about Linux if it weren't for Qt (and you can take that any way you like... simply technical merit, or the fact that without Qt, Gtk wouldn't have been started).
I hear you though. On some days I wish Qt were LGPL/BSD. Simple licenses make life so much easier... But it would be a tradeoff.
OK, this is a shameless troll but I'm really peeved by the GTK file selector and the way it hides what directory you're in unless you press this tiny little arrow. Is that going to confuse people or what?
That's not a troll at all - it's a reasonable opinion backed with a coherent justification. That said, I've got my own reasons for disliking the GTK+ file selector, but this isn't one of them. In fact, it's the way that applications work on the Mac, which has influenced many Gnome design decisions.
Having fielded enough anguished calls from relatives and acquaintances who have 'lost' their files by accidentally saving them in another directory, I don't think it's a bad idea. I'm talking about people whose clicking speed is far faster than their speed of reading comprehension, especially of computer jargon. The fewer opportunities they are given to click the wrong thing, the better, I think. Hiding extra details is just simpler for the large numbers of people for whom directory hierarchies are an esoteric mystery, and it still works for those who understand it. And, in fact, if you tend to save all the files from a given application in a specific location, it will work well.
If you want complexity and myriad configuration options, KDE is for you. But the simplicity of Gnome is entirely appropriate for non-specialist users, in my opinion - in fact, it's probably a better fit for those people.
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.