Errare umanum est. That is, programs will always have bugs, and C programs will always have buffer overflows.
It is good to breed better programmers (I hope next generation will do 1/10th of the bugs I do ). But I would also see implemented some of the long-debated-never-done methods we might already have to prevent buffer overruns to be so nasty:
A kernel which can run in 'stack protect' mode, so that a buffer overflow can only crash the program, not be exploitable to execute arbitrary code faked as user input (I read of a proposed patch to Linux kernel, rejected because of some of the kernel actually re-writes the stack??)
Including bound-checking libraries like StackGuard in standard compilers (is there any gcc options wich add bound checking?)
REMOVE from standard C library functions which do not allow for bound checking (aka strcpy, sscanf, gets...), or at least force programmer to use a --i-don't-care-for-security switch.
I find the criticisms on *BSD very similar to the ones usually done against my distro of heart. I simpatize with *BSD people.
The answer is not to flame, of course, but to try to explain the benefits of a minimalist computer culture, which relies more on the deep knowledge of the tools at hand rather than on some shiny bloated software which tries to outguess and outsmart its users, ofter failing miserably.
I'll say again: humans are (potentially) more intelligent than computers. Therefore humans should stay in control, not vice-versa.
Nope. It's fettuccini. Just like fettuccini Alfredo, the most famoush italian dish - you can find it in any italian restaurant in the US.
The fact that nobody in Italy knows what is it is secondary - real italian food is what you eat in US italian restaurant (so start eating garlic bread everyday, please).
I once was the tutor of a young co-worker self-teaching C++. Basically I gave him a small assignment and returned later to inspect his code.
I was faced with the results of learning C++ without knowing OOD or OOP principles.
I can't post here his code, but it was bad enough to make me invent a new term on the spot: fettuccini classes, the OOP evolution of spaghetti code.
Yes. Red-Hat always played its PR with open-source community very carefully. SuSE is more blunt : since GPL allows to use open-source as a base for a system with proprietary components, (as far as you keep open the open-source components), that is what they do (YaST[1,2] have never made open-source, or have they?).
OTOH they are coherent in this. And they pay back in many ways ( XFree development, drivers...), so I think they earned the right to do what they do. Not that I'm in the position of granting them any right, but this is slashdot after all;-).
that was the last time i will ever buy Linux from a mainstream distribution again
Big business have problem at offering service for open-source, because any local guru could open a shop to compete with them, having access to the same knowledge pool. And the local guru would be able to offer the same quality at lower prices, due to lower hoveread in its one-man (or few men) company.
So big business tend to focus on few strategic locations and on customers that pay extra money for support ( the price of any distro can't buy you more than minutes of a trained professional ).
One of the strongest selling point of SuSE in Europe is its localization (yep, even many linux users care for reading funny-translated system messages in their language, rather than aseptic and cryptic system messages in english:).
So I think they wanted to give to their company a few months advantage from competing distros. Isn't that the same reason why recently Red Hat shipped with a development version of GCC?
Open Source is a Good Thing(TM), but it makes lot harder to compete.
Except that window maker is a window manager (you know that, don't you;), while Nautilus will be a file manager (on too many steroids).
Sure thing, I doubt I'll ever run Nautilus on my Pentium 150 Laptop ( which I hope to keep for the next four years ). This is why if some Gnome developer would come out with a light-weight Gnome-compliant file manager (heck, also a slightly improved version of GMC would do it) it will have my grazie forever ( well, maybe until I change the Laptop ).
A Solaris _kernel_ ( or any way a Sun-made kernel ) : nobody knows better than Sun how to squeeze the maximum from their own hardware)
A full Linux/OSS userland, including well-known startup scripts, free compilers & debuggers [I bougth a Sun C++ Licence and, would you believe, it did not include any debugger, not even the command-line one], toolkits (Motif is old), APT as package manager (much better than Solaris tools), my choice of Window Manager, bash, etc.... I dunno about how good XFree86 would be on Sun machines, but the ones I use at work ( E450 ) have pretty standard PCI graphic cards.
What I have arranged on my machines is similar, but there is still too much Solaris and too few OSS.
Please refrain from using any term derived from
ancient Latin(c). Latin Language(c) is copyrighted
by Roman Empire, and only its certified descendands can use it or any work derived from it.
there is no consistent paradigm for 3D interaction
Your house maybe? Directories as rooms, files as objects with a shape suggesting the contents, desktops as floors ?
Re:How to do a 3d GUI right - just thoughts
on
3D GUI Project
·
· Score: 2
- The view should be always as if you are looking to the 'computer world' through a window(the screen) and behind it there are objects, some closer than others.
- Object shapes suggest function.
- Use the mouse to point to an object (i.e. a directory 'door' or a file ), just like aiming in a 3D game.
- One mouse button can zoom the view on the pointed object, with additional text wich defines properties etc..., the other to move
your point of view close to the object, changing the perspective. A double click uses the object.
- Stick on movement on a plane. Walking is easier than flying. If needed, programs may create stairs and/or elevators.
- A suitable metafora could be a buiding. The ground floor is the 'raw' file-system, with a room for each directory, with doors carrying to sub-directories and to the parent directory. Other floors are user-defined 'desktops' for diffferent type of activities ( office, games, etc... ).Installation programs may create their own rooms and floors.
- Drag and drop. Just like now, but 3D, constrained on the current 'walking plane'.
- Allow user to carry a tool box, with the most used programs/documents. Again, just like games.
- You need an easy way to turn around yorself : the mouse wheel ?
Mmm... it looks like a cross between today desktops and DukeNukem3D (that being the last game I played, a few years ago). But why throw away good ideas? And games _are_ intuitive, after all.
Given the assioma that a monkey, typing randomly, has a non-null chance to type in the Amlet (or your preferred novel of your preferred author), I propose a distributed computing project to do just that (after all, world's whole computer set should reach the same intelligence of a monkey)
- the scientific development of Mankind is far more advanced than it's ethic development. With Nuclear technology, we have been very close to self-distruction, and we are not out yet ( too many nuclear weapons still around ). With genetics ?
The 'uninformed mob' - which I belong, knowing nothing of genetics, - is scared because we have seen too many times that Truth and Science are zero in today world when compared with Money.
I don't know the right answer to the 'golden rice problem', but I think I know the right question: would you eat it? would you let your children eat it? Would you allow others decide to save you and, en passant, use you as testbed for a new technology?
As I read it, he said they want more 'mindshare', not 'marketshare'. I.e., convincing more kids to joining the fun of making mud pies ( or even only throwing them in each other face:-).
That's just stereotype bullshit
Maybe. But I'm stereotyping on myself ( did you read my e-mail, not to talk of my post? ).
In France, tech and media industry is larger than food, fashion and tourism combined. I don't even talk about UK and Germany.
Right. Thats why these countries opposes the software licence, IMO (again: did you _read_ my post?).
BTW, you should differentiate between business made *selling* technology made elsewere and business made *creating* technology.
Maybe its because the smaller economies are worried about losing innovations they make to larger ones.
Nope.
Countries against software patents are the ones which try to develop technology. They fight software patents because they see them as a tool for US-based mega-corporations to strangle smaller Europe-based companies. Also, open-source is very present in these countries.
Countries which favor software patents are mostly technology consumer, not producers. They don't care about the issue, since their economies are based on other things ( fashion, food industry, tourism ). They might hope to exchange acceptance of software patents with other concession from US (e.g. less limitation on import of food ).
This is a generalization, of course, and some guesswork. But not far from true, IMO.
It's a blessing to have the command history in the RUN command under the Start menu.
One of the things I greatly appreciated in KDE 1.x was the integration of 'readline-style' command history in some widgets ( the address text field of the file manager, as well as in the mini-command utility ). You could use TAB for file completion and cursor keys to recall previous conmmand/addresses.
It will be sane if it will allow anyone to handle the signature approvals. so that a corporate IT department set-up its desktop so that it can run only software with their (of IT department) signature. This would allow IT departments to deploy more secure installation ( if that is possible with M$oft software) without having to depend from M$oft.
/PARANOIA ON
For the sake of conspiration theories let's think of a different scnario : when the first virus/worm/trojan of Whistler will appear, a dialogue like this will take place:
User:"Help, help. This virus just f*ked up my data!"
M$oft: "oh, but you turned out this very important security feature!!!!! It is **your** fault, then !!!"
User:"But I just wanted to run FooSoft SuperBestSoftware 1.2"
M$soft:"Ah, but FooSoft does not comply with our security policy and it's not certified. Why don't you run M$oft UseOnlyMe application. It does the same thing, but better. And it's more secure. You'll have to pay every time you run it, but security has no price in this virus-ridden world." /PARANOIA OFF
I don't see anything bad in selling ads with a non-official debian-site ( not sure that would be a suitable business model, however ).
The important thing is that any doc is written with an open licence, so they can be linked to, copied, mirrored and edited.
In the Web is easy to integrate documentation, when copyright and such do not hinder you.
debian-user is much appreciated as a very helpful info source. However some of the veterans are starting to be annoyed by the many newbie questions (while others discuss how to put toghether newbies sites ). With more newbies-oriented docs and sites, some of the newbie-introduction load will be put off the shoulder of the list.
1. Linux hystorically aims to people that don't mind tweak with configuration and often favors flexibility over easy-to-use.
2. Modems, video cards and such *must* be compatible with M$soft OS or they will be out of market. With linux, it is the OS which shall adapt to the hardware.
3. Hardware manuifacturers don't want to realease specs or provide open-source drivers.OTOH, many in linux community are against close-source drivers.
About how much Windoze is easy to use, I disagree, however. Some time ago, I gave my old computers to some computer-illeterate relatives. I re-installed Win98 on it. Well, they had (and still have) the same understanding problems they could have had with, say, the GNOME or KDE interface.
There is nothing that beats knowledge to make something easy to use.
Slashdot Mirror
It is good to breed better programmers (I hope next generation will do 1/10th of the bugs I do ). But I would also see implemented some of the long-debated-never-done methods we might already have to prevent buffer overruns to be so nasty:
The answer is not to flame, of course, but to try to explain the benefits of a minimalist computer culture, which relies more on the deep knowledge of the tools at hand rather than on some shiny bloated software which tries to outguess and outsmart its users, ofter failing miserably.
I'll say again: humans are (potentially) more intelligent than computers. Therefore humans should stay in control, not vice-versa.
Nope. It's fettuccini. Just like fettuccini Alfredo, the most famoush italian dish - you can find it in any italian restaurant in the US.
The fact that nobody in Italy knows what is it is secondary - real italian food is what you eat in US italian restaurant (so start eating garlic bread everyday, please).
I was faced with the results of learning C++ without knowing OOD or OOP principles.
I can't post here his code, but it was bad enough to make me invent a new term on the spot: fettuccini classes, the OOP evolution of spaghetti code.
OTOH they are coherent in this. And they pay back in many ways ( XFree development, drivers ...), so I think they earned the right to do what they do. ;-).
Not that I'm in the position of granting them any right, but this is slashdot after all
Big business have problem at offering service for open-source, because any local guru could open a shop to compete with them, having access to the same knowledge pool. And the local guru would be able to offer the same quality at lower prices, due to lower hoveread in its one-man (or few men) company.
So big business tend to focus on few strategic locations and on customers that pay extra money for support ( the price of any distro can't buy you more than minutes of a trained professional ).
So I think they wanted to give to their company a few months advantage from competing distros. Isn't that the same reason why recently Red Hat shipped with a development version of GCC?
Open Source is a Good Thing(TM), but it makes lot harder to compete.
Sure thing, I doubt I'll ever run Nautilus on my Pentium 150 Laptop ( which I hope to keep for the next four years ). This is why if some Gnome developer would come out with a light-weight Gnome-compliant file manager (heck, also a slightly improved version of GMC would do it) it will have my grazie forever ( well, maybe until I change the Laptop ).
What I have arranged on my machines is similar, but there is still too much Solaris and too few OSS.
Please refrain from using any term derived from ancient Latin(c). Latin Language(c) is copyrighted by Roman Empire, and only its certified descendands can use it or any work derived from it.
Well, no. All an editorial board can provide is a coerent bias, i.e. a bias aiming toward the board's set of prejudices.
Including uncensored world-wide contributions, OTHA, povides random bias, which can lead to two results :
One could argue that given the strength of RMS prejudices^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H ideas, GNUpedia will probably have a very coherent bias ;)
[Assume mandatory smiley here]
I've always wandered : how many remote exploitable buffer overflows are really unintentional?
Your house maybe? Directories as rooms, files as objects with a shape suggesting the contents, desktops as floors ?
- The view should be always as if you are looking to the 'computer world' through a window(the screen) and behind it there are objects, some closer than others.
..., the other to move
... ).Installation programs may create their own rooms and floors.
... it looks like a cross between today desktops and DukeNukem3D (that being the last game I played, a few years ago). But why throw away good ideas? And games _are_ intuitive, after all.
- Object shapes suggest function.
- Use the mouse to point to an object (i.e. a directory 'door' or a file ), just like aiming in a 3D game.
- One mouse button can zoom the view on the pointed object, with additional text wich defines properties etc
your point of view close to the object, changing the perspective. A double click uses the object.
- Stick on movement on a plane. Walking is easier than flying. If needed, programs may create stairs and/or elevators.
- A suitable metafora could be a buiding. The ground floor is the 'raw' file-system, with a room for each directory, with doors carrying to sub-directories and to the parent directory. Other floors are user-defined 'desktops' for diffferent type of activities ( office, games, etc
- Drag and drop. Just like now, but 3D, constrained on the current 'walking plane'.
- Allow user to carry a tool box, with the most used programs/documents. Again, just like games.
- You need an easy way to turn around yorself : the mouse wheel ?
Mmm
Given the assioma that a monkey, typing randomly, has a non-null chance to type in the Amlet (or your preferred novel of your preferred author), I propose a distributed computing project to do just that (after all, world's whole computer set should reach the same intelligence of a monkey)
- the scientific development of Mankind is far more advanced than it's ethic development. With Nuclear technology, we have been very close to self-distruction, and we are not out yet ( too many nuclear weapons still around ). With genetics ?
The 'uninformed mob' - which I belong, knowing nothing of genetics, - is scared because we have seen too many times that Truth and Science are zero in today world when compared with Money.
I don't know the right answer to the 'golden rice problem', but I think I know the right question: would you eat it? would you let your children eat it? Would you allow others decide to save you and, en passant, use you as testbed for a new technology?
As I read it, he said they want more 'mindshare', not 'marketshare'. I.e., convincing more kids to joining the fun of making mud pies ( or even only throwing them in each other face :-).
Maybe. But I'm stereotyping on myself ( did you read my e-mail, not to talk of my post? ).
In France, tech and media industry is larger than food, fashion and tourism combined. I don't even talk about UK and Germany.
Right. Thats why these countries opposes the software licence, IMO (again: did you _read_ my post?).
BTW, you should differentiate between business made *selling* technology made elsewere and business made *creating* technology.
Nope.
Countries against software patents are the ones which try to develop technology. They fight software patents because they see them as a tool for US-based mega-corporations to strangle smaller Europe-based companies. Also, open-source is very present in these countries.
Countries which favor software patents are mostly technology consumer, not producers. They don't care about the issue, since their economies are based on other things ( fashion, food industry, tourism ). They might hope to exchange acceptance of software patents with other concession from US (e.g. less limitation on import of food ).
This is a generalization, of course, and some guesswork. But not far from true, IMO.
One of the things I greatly appreciated in KDE 1.x was the integration of 'readline-style' command history in some widgets ( the address text field of the file manager, as well as in the mini-command utility ). You could use TAB for file completion and cursor keys to recall previous conmmand/addresses.
Sadly, it seems gone now.
For the sake of conspiration theories let's think of a different scnario : when the first virus/worm/trojan of Whistler will appear, a dialogue like this will take place:
User:"Help, help. This virus just f*ked up my data!"
M$oft: "oh, but you turned out this very important security feature!!!!! It is **your** fault, then !!!"
User:"But I just wanted to run FooSoft SuperBestSoftware 1.2"
M$soft:"Ah, but FooSoft does not comply with our security policy and it's not certified. Why don't you run M$oft UseOnlyMe application. It does the same thing, but better. And it's more secure. You'll have to pay every time you run it, but security has no price in this virus-ridden world."
The important thing is that any doc is written with an open licence, so they can be linked to, copied, mirrored and edited. In the Web is easy to integrate documentation, when copyright and such do not hinder you.
debian-user is much appreciated as a very helpful info source. However some of the veterans are starting to be annoyed by the many newbie questions (while others discuss how to put toghether newbies sites ). With more newbies-oriented docs and sites, some of the newbie-introduction load will be put off the shoulder of the list.
Really? I had SuSE for two years and never read that. I though it was somewhat 'inspired' by RH, since it uses RPM.
Their package manager tool ( a part of YaST actually) _does_ resemble dselect, however.
1. Linux hystorically aims to people that don't mind tweak with configuration and often favors flexibility over easy-to-use.
2. Modems, video cards and such *must* be compatible with M$soft OS or they will be out of market. With linux, it is the OS which shall adapt to the hardware.
3. Hardware manuifacturers don't want to realease specs or provide open-source drivers.OTOH, many in linux community are against close-source drivers.
About how much Windoze is easy to use, I disagree, however. Some time ago, I gave my old computers to some computer-illeterate relatives. I re-installed Win98 on it. Well, they had (and still have) the same understanding problems they could have had with, say, the GNOME or KDE interface.
There is nothing that beats knowledge to make something easy to use.