I recently was doing some work writing batch files to install bioses in a FreeDOS environment.
Did you know that batch scripting has only 3 conditional operations? You can test if a file exists, whether 2 strings are the same, or you can check whether the errorlevel variable is greater than a given constant.
The DOS command line is what the UNIX command line would be if it was programmed by someone in 7th grade.
It makes me think less highly of Apple. They are striking out against their fans with this action. That seems unsporting and financially stupid in the long run.
Sure leaking the rumour may have been illegal. But not all laws are important. And often the punishments don't fit.
>>If it weren't Apple but somebody as supremely unsexy like say, Unisys, would it even be news?
As a slashdot reader, when I think of Unisys I think about their failed anti-UNIX marketing campagne. Their anti-UNIX advertisements were served from a UNIX system. It wasn't exactly news but it did make me laugh.
>>So, you heard about Jon Johansen, the Creator of DeCSS?
I was on the livid list immediately after the Declan article came out. It was obvious to everyone at the time that the article was horribly wrong. And yet that is the version that most people heard... BTW. If you haven't read the article then you are too ignorant on the topic to even be talking about decss.
>>So, DeCSS was a clear break of GPL!
Jon said pretty clearly that he got the code from MoRE. As for breaking the GPL, give me a break. A lot of adults don't understand the GPL so I can't fault a 15 year old kid for being confused about it.
People were asking him to release the code and he referred them to an adult because he was afraid of getting arrested. I can't fault a kid for doing that either.
Basically everyone is blaming Jon as a result of that stupid article. He got arrested because of the article. He gets cut down on slashdot for not writing the code that the article said he wrote. I say blame Declan don't blame Jon.
In Windows you _have_ to write an installer because the package management is not as advanced. Debian provides more advanced package management so each application does not have to write its own.
The challenges of distributing software for Windows and Linux are not even close to being the same. Microsoft releases a new version of Windows every 2 years. Debian changes every 6 seconds. And yet, in my experience installing Debian software is easier and faster.
For games and other non-free software of course installers are still necessary.
An "ad hominem" attack on your argument would mean that Spitzak said your argument was invalid because _you personally_ made it. He clearly did not do so.
The rest of your post doesn't make any sense either.
You claimed that people use Microsoft Office because of the high quality. Without denying that Office was a high quality product, Spitzak showed that most people use Microsoft Office to be compatible with what other people use.
>>The distinction between an "actor" and an "object" can only be clear in a primitive system.
Not primitive; well designed.
After all, isn't that the point? If you don't know what is code, you can't tell what the code is doing and you can't tell if the code is secure.
I'll grant that security is not always easy. Users are always trying to put code where only data should be. If you ask for a filename in a BASH script then they'll enter "$(rm -rf/)". If you ask them for their username in a web page some crazy punk will enter "' and where sex = 'F' and state='petrified" to try find all the petrified ladies...
But that's the tricky bit: Making sure that all the data stays data...
Id created their genre and has been the technology leader ever since. Some first person shooters were arguable more fun and in Duke Nukem you could kick the head around which was pretty cool. But Id has always had the best technology.
You think that a few academics could beat them at graphics programming when no one else has been able to? That seems silly to me. That's like saying, "He could win a race in the olympics but he is too busy to enter."
Until some professor creates a better graphics engine than whatever Id is producing, I am afraid they will have to deal with it: A college drop out is kicking their butt...
Computer manufacturers could benifit from more reliable BIOSes. If they found a bug they could fix it themselves, quickly. BIOSes are buggy much more frequently than you would maybe suspect.
What if the website checks to make sure that you have downloaded all the.gifs embeded in the popup? The only way you can completely emulate a popup is if you download all the things that regular popup would download.
I do like the idea of killing the invisible popup after 5 seconds. It could be changed to 30 seconds because it's not like you are in a big rush to get rid of an invisible window.
The solution is to allow popups, but not to display them to the screen.
It's not really an improvement since it wastes bandwidth. It is really bad for websites that have popups but don't install this software because now they will have to pay the bandwidth costs for popup images that will never be displayed.
In my mind though, computer users rights are more important than website owners. It is justified to waste bandwidth if it makes computer users happy.
The funny thing is that I have helped many complete strangers with Linux.
Windows, on the other hand, is frustrating to work with because it's crap.
Windows is a crappy operating system. It should have been decrappified before it shipped. But Microsoft didn't do their job. So now I'm doing stuck with decrappifying Windows for them.
Except I'm not getting paid. And also by working with Microsoft I'm competing against my own company who competes with Microsoft.
It makes me a little bitter because right now every company that works with computers but isn't named Microsoft is sufferring. But Microsoft isn't sufferring... No No. Microsoft is able to make 85% profit.
And why is Microsoft so profitable? Because all the difficult decrappifying work is done for free after the systems have been shipped, that's why.
If I was going to create a distribution, I'd probably base it on Debian.
If you base your distribution off a comercial Linux the people who created the base distro will view you as competition and say bad things about you to the press.
The Debian development process is completely open and is garaunteed to stay that way. If you want, you can probably merge some code in the upstream source and save time.
I don't even need to read the article about Bill Gates to know how insightful his quote was.
For example, my farm has been in the familly for generations. These days it becomes harder and harder to compete with the mega-farm corporations and imported food products. Where does a man turn when faced with increased presure to sell the family heritage and give up his dreams? Bill Gates. Bill Gates is a man you can trust. He understands farmers because he is one.
The difference is about money. With Linux you can upgrade if you want to or not if you don't. The old products are always available for free and the new products are also free.
The other problem is chargin for security upgrades. With Linux security upgrades are always free but with Microsoft you sometimes have to pay for the software all over again.
A Wild West aproach to internet justice would be great.
Instead of throwing lawsuits around just bring in the programmers and attack the networks with technology. This way if you want to create a network all you need is a few great ideas and some determination... As it is p2p programmers must compete against corporations based on how much they can pay a lawyer.
Unfortunately, I suspect doubt p2p programmers will not be allowed to automate counter attacks against attackers...
So basically the idea is crap until that gets changed.
PS. One idea that's related to this is that we could solve minor disagreements between parties by giant robot battles. This would save millions in tax payer dollars.
Well it's not really that difficult, but it does require some thought.
The main problem with the screenshots is that they seem to be of obscure features rather than the ordinary things I would do all the time.
apt-cache search apt-cache show apt-get install apt-get upgrade -u --fix-missing
That's all I need 95% of the time.
I'm confused by what the color scheme was meant to represent, and what the problem is with the project versions.
These screenshots are obviously designed by programmers for programmers. That's why there is a screenshot of dependency hell. A marketter would not have included it. On the other hand, I trust open source because I know the developers are going to be honest even if it doesn't make business sense. It would be nice to fix dependency hell, but it can't realistically happen. Microsoft fixes it by controlling the entire process and by releasing new versions less frequently than even Debian. Linux is developed too fast, and by too many different people for the problem to go away entirely.
"Actually, all the user needs to know is that there is a new version available. Nothing else." I disagree, I sometimes wonder what version is going to be installed. They could make all the new versions a different color, that way everyone wins.
The article let's windows off too easily. I have never liked windows update. It always makes me nervous. To download a patch to active X, I had to turn on active X. How do I revert changes? It never tells me what it is doing to my system. These days windows update seems to be turned on by default. It pops up when I use other people's systems. Windows update is like X-10 ads without the buxom babysitters. I don't think it ever gives any information about what program is going to upgraded. I never know if I should press yes to upgrade, or if it is going to trash the system.
Eugenia's articles are great. We need more discussion about user interfaces.
If I remember correctly, the big software they had was a minimal version of X that was optomized for TV screens.
I think they talked about open sourcing it, but when they went under they decided to sell it to someone. Or perhaps they were going to use it to start a new company or something.
I thought Indrema was pretty cool. Their ideas about hardware were pretty nifty if applied to regular PCs. PCs are generally ugly, both on the outside and even more on the inside. It's almost as if there is a big box, and everyone has been doing there thinking there since 1982.
Slashdot Mirror
I recently was doing some work writing batch files to install bioses in a FreeDOS environment.
Did you know that batch scripting has only 3 conditional operations? You can test if a file exists, whether 2 strings are the same, or you can check whether the errorlevel variable is greater than a given constant.
The DOS command line is what the UNIX command line would be if it was programmed by someone in 7th grade.
>>How controversial is it?
It makes me think less highly of Apple. They are striking out against their fans with this action. That seems unsporting and financially stupid in the long run.
Sure leaking the rumour may have been illegal. But not all laws are important. And often the punishments don't fit.
>>If it weren't Apple but somebody as supremely unsexy like say, Unisys, would it even be news?
As a slashdot reader, when I think of Unisys I think about their failed anti-UNIX marketing campagne. Their anti-UNIX advertisements were served from a UNIX system. It wasn't exactly news but it did make me laugh.
>>So, you heard about Jon Johansen, the Creator of DeCSS?
I was on the livid list immediately after the Declan article came out. It was obvious to everyone at the time that the article was horribly wrong. And yet that is the version that most people heard... BTW. If you haven't read the article then you are too ignorant on the topic to even be talking about decss.
>>So, DeCSS was a clear break of GPL!
Jon said pretty clearly that he got the code from MoRE. As for breaking the GPL, give me a break. A lot of adults don't understand the GPL so I can't fault a 15 year old kid for being confused about it.
People were asking him to release the code and he referred them to an adult because he was afraid of getting arrested. I can't fault a kid for doing that either.
Basically everyone is blaming Jon as a result of that stupid article. He got arrested because of the article. He gets cut down on slashdot for not writing the code that the article said he wrote. I say blame Declan don't blame Jon.
I haven't tried the Adobe text to speech software but I'd imagine it might get tedious after a couple novels worth.
Could be wrong though... Has happenned before.
In Windows you _have_ to write an installer because the package management is not as advanced. Debian provides more advanced package management so each application does not have to write its own.
The challenges of distributing software for Windows and Linux are not even close to being the same. Microsoft releases a new version of Windows every 2 years. Debian changes every 6 seconds. And yet, in my experience installing Debian software is easier and faster.
For games and other non-free software of course installers are still necessary.
An "ad hominem" attack on your argument would mean that Spitzak said your argument was invalid because _you personally_ made it. He clearly did not do so.
The rest of your post doesn't make any sense either.
You claimed that people use Microsoft Office because of the high quality. Without denying that Office was a high quality product, Spitzak showed that most people use Microsoft Office to be compatible with what other people use.
>>The distinction between an "actor" and an "object" can only be clear in a primitive system.
/)". If you ask them for their username in a web page some crazy punk will enter "' and where sex = 'F' and state='petrified" to try find all the petrified ladies...
Not primitive; well designed.
After all, isn't that the point? If you don't know what is code, you can't tell what the code is doing and you can't tell if the code is secure.
I'll grant that security is not always easy. Users are always trying to put code where only data should be. If you ask for a filename in a BASH script then they'll enter "$(rm -rf
But that's the tricky bit: Making sure that all the data stays data...
> I've seen plenty better, I guess you haven't seen the voxel engines developed by researchers.
Voxels??? Voxels may be good if you're writing a flight simulator and want to render a mountain from 30,000 feet. But, please be serious...
Id created their genre and has been the technology leader ever since. Some first person shooters were arguable more fun and in Duke Nukem you could kick the head around which was pretty cool. But Id has always had the best technology.
You think that a few academics could beat them at graphics programming when no one else has been able to? That seems silly to me. That's like saying, "He could win a race in the olympics but he is too busy to enter."
Until some professor creates a better graphics engine than whatever Id is producing, I am afraid they will have to deal with it: A college drop out is kicking their butt...
linuxists can't do anything original so they steal everything from Microsoft...
It depends...
Computer manufacturers could benifit from more reliable BIOSes. If they found a bug they could fix it themselves, quickly. BIOSes are buggy much more frequently than you would maybe suspect.
I had to deal with a BIOS bug this afternoon.
What if the website checks to make sure that you have downloaded all the .gifs embeded in the popup? The only way you can completely emulate a popup is if you download all the things that regular popup would download.
I do like the idea of killing the invisible popup after 5 seconds. It could be changed to 30 seconds because it's not like you are in a big rush to get rid of an invisible window.
The solution is to allow popups, but not to display them to the screen.
It's not really an improvement since it wastes bandwidth. It is really bad for websites that have popups but don't install this software because now they will have to pay the bandwidth costs for popup images that will never be displayed.
In my mind though, computer users rights are more important than website owners. It is justified to waste bandwidth if it makes computer users happy.
The funny thing is that I have helped many complete strangers with Linux.
Windows, on the other hand, is frustrating to work with because it's crap.
Windows is a crappy operating system. It should have been decrappified before it shipped. But Microsoft didn't do their job. So now I'm doing stuck with decrappifying Windows for them.
Except I'm not getting paid. And also by working with Microsoft I'm competing against my own company who competes with Microsoft.
It makes me a little bitter because right now every company that works with computers but isn't named Microsoft is sufferring. But Microsoft isn't sufferring... No No. Microsoft is able to make 85% profit.
And why is Microsoft so profitable? Because all the difficult decrappifying work is done for free after the systems have been shipped, that's why.
If I was going to create a distribution, I'd probably base it on Debian.
If you base your distribution off a comercial Linux the people who created the base distro will view you as competition and say bad things about you to the press.
The Debian development process is completely open and is garaunteed to stay that way. If you want, you can probably merge some code in the upstream source and save time.
I don't even need to read the article about Bill Gates to know how insightful his quote was.
For example, my farm has been in the familly for generations. These days it becomes harder and harder to compete with the mega-farm corporations and imported food products. Where does a man turn when faced with increased presure to sell the family heritage and give up his dreams? Bill Gates. Bill Gates is a man you can trust. He understands farmers because he is one.
>> So again, you need to upgrade your distribution if you want recent security fixes, et al...
But "it's free, so quit your whining"...
The difference is about money. With Linux you can upgrade if you want to or not if you don't. The old products are always available for free and the new products are also free.
The other problem is chargin for security upgrades. With Linux security upgrades are always free but with Microsoft you sometimes have to pay for the software all over again.
A Wild West aproach to internet justice would be great.
Instead of throwing lawsuits around just bring in the programmers and attack the networks with technology. This way if you want to create a network all you need is a few great ideas and some determination... As it is p2p programmers must compete against corporations based on how much they can pay a lawyer.
Unfortunately, I suspect doubt p2p programmers will not be allowed to automate counter attacks against attackers...
So basically the idea is crap until that gets changed.
PS. One idea that's related to this is that we could solve minor disagreements between parties by giant robot battles. This would save millions in tax payer dollars.
In some senses the second point is true. Look at the illegal in America mp3 encoders and players. Or PGP had patent problems initially as well.
I can't think of any case where an open source program was written but became completely unavailable because of patent problems.
If you want to have a really "no bloat" browser, then you have to make your application gray with really small widgets.
at the kernel level threads are just processes with shared memory.
Well it's not really that difficult, but it does require some thought.
The main problem with the screenshots is that they seem to be of obscure features rather than the ordinary things I would do all the time.
apt-cache search
apt-cache show
apt-get install
apt-get upgrade -u --fix-missing
That's all I need 95% of the time.
I'm confused by what the color scheme was meant to represent, and what the problem is with the project versions.
These screenshots are obviously designed by programmers for programmers. That's why there is a screenshot of dependency hell. A marketter would not have included it. On the other hand, I trust open source because I know the developers are going to be honest even if it doesn't make business sense. It would be nice to fix dependency hell, but it can't realistically happen. Microsoft fixes it by controlling the entire process and by releasing new versions less frequently than even Debian. Linux is developed too fast, and by too many different people for the problem to go away entirely.
"Actually, all the user needs to know is that there is a new version available. Nothing else." I disagree, I sometimes wonder what version is going to be installed. They could make all the new versions a different color, that way everyone wins.
The article let's windows off too easily. I have never liked windows update. It always makes me nervous. To download a patch to active X, I had to turn on active X. How do I revert changes? It never tells me what it is doing to my system. These days windows update seems to be turned on by default. It pops up when I use other people's systems. Windows update is like X-10 ads without the buxom babysitters. I don't think it ever gives any information about what program is going to upgraded. I never know if I should press yes to upgrade, or if it is going to trash the system.
Eugenia's articles are great. We need more discussion about user interfaces.
If I remember correctly, the big software they had was a minimal version of X that was optomized for TV screens.
I think they talked about open sourcing it, but when they went under they decided to sell it to someone. Or perhaps they were going to use it to start a new company or something.
I thought Indrema was pretty cool. Their ideas about hardware were pretty nifty if applied to regular PCs. PCs are generally ugly, both on the outside and even more on the inside. It's almost as if there is a big box, and everyone has been doing there thinking there since 1982.
Instead of making threats about the law, just point out that the downloaded version is crap compared to the real thing.
You know that everyone who downloads the movie is also going to see it in theatres so why get you're panties in a bunch?
I saw a downloaded bersion of the first one, and I still went to the theatre. I'd buy the movie if my roomates hadn't.