we also need to attract desktop users, and this requires eyecandy..
No, to attract desktop users you need:
Applications
More applications
A user-friendly interface, i.e. a constistent computer-supported methaphor that allow them to learn how to do the things they have to do without loosing time with meaningless (for them) details.
Eye-candy is for geeks and for people which use the computer as 'status-symbol'. Maybe still a worthing target, but different from the 'average desktop user'.
After all, labor right costs (retirement plan, health-care, overtime) are a great part of the differences between a wage in the first world and a wage in the third world. As soon as third world workers will be granted them, it will not be so cheap to hire work there.
Also, let's speed up the rising of living standards in the third world, and wage will raise, too.
Psyco has been already mentioned. Another interesting approach to opptimising python code (only if and where it is too slow) is
Pyrex".
Unlike Psyco,it requires small changes (adding some type information) to the code of the python modules you want to optimize, and then produces an equivalent (but faster) C module.
Interesting pointers. But calling the Shared Source Licence BSD-style is a bit stretching. SSL is only free for non-commercial use, while BSD-style licenced software is free for any use (as Microsoft was happy to find out).
In any case, it is obvious to me that there are still a great many hurdles humanity must face before individuals actually have the freedom so many millions of people have died for in the last century alone.
This remember me something I read somewhere: "dying for freedom is sometime necessary to get it, but living for freedom is mandatory to keep it".
I don't expect (or demand) that Microsoft open up their protocol software. I just pointed out how "unbalanced" their idea of Public Domain is: for them (but not only them) it is something to take from withouth restriction, but never to contribute to.
Gates was talking about cross-licencing, basicly saying "I'm pissed off with GPL becase I cannot trade my little secrets with other little secrets (which is what IT corporations like to do) but I'm forced to do things in the open".
they have made it clear that they think a package like the BSD TCP stack should be released under a very liberal license
If they were honest in this, they would have released their own protocol implementations under a similar liberal licence. So, where is the library to handle word documents? Or the reference implementation for SMB? What about.NET?
Linux will not break into the average user desktop until *third party* software and drivers are easily installable and distro-independent.
In theory, the Linux Standard Base (LSB) should fix this problem: a package (RPM, which is the standard of commercial distro ) built against the LSB should be installable on any of the distributions that claim to be LSB-compliant (and all the recent distributions claim this).
I use Debian and do not oftten need commercial software, so I don't know how well it works in practice. Personally, I would push LSB even further, releasing an actual LSB meta-distribution, on which vendors may base their own products (like UnitedLinux, but more company-neutral).
Anyway, I don't think that many desktop commercial vendors are actually interested in porting apps to linux, otherwise they could use one of many hacks to work around missing dependencies, especially now that RAM and disk space are relatively cheap.
Also, building a middle-size App for two or three distros (RH, Suse and Mandrake cover most of the Linux market that could be interested in commercia software) is not such a big hassle, since all distros are source-compatible anyway and there is plenty of unused disk space on a CD.
this is the same business model that gaming systems have used for years.
it makes perfect sense for video games...
But there are other ways to implement the same model, ways that hare more respectful for the customers, because they are told the whole of it, not just treated like buying robots.
For instance, they could sell the game machine at its right price and offer to its buyers a huge discount on the first 5 (or 10) games they choose to buy. The offer would (probably) have the same appeal and would generate the same revenue than the sell_the_box_cheap_and_the_games_overpriced approach, _but_ would be more honest to the customers.
The best way to use glade IMO is via libglade.
GUI code generators are usually messy, and Glade is no exception (at the very least, it should generate separate file(s) for each main window). But with libglade, your application code is neatly separated from your presentation/control code, at the price of a small slowdown at startup.
This is not a new approach (Motif had it with UML, for instance) but lately has been neglegted in favor of code generators. I think it is time to reconsider this choice (although with OOP you have other ways to obtain the same separation).
Well, phoenix (0.5) crashes on my machine (Debian) in many ways, often downloading stuff. A couple of times, in not yet determined situations, it started to eat all memory, making the kernel to swap furiously until I killed phoenix threads.
Nothing wrong with that, Phoenix being still an alpha product. But please do not compare it with mature products, even if they are from Microsoft.
Also I don't understand why there are so many threads when nothing is going on (no download in progress and a single page shown).
What the US needs first is a publicly funded broadcasting corporation that is at an arms length of government and receives no funding from the private sector.
Ugh! Don't, please. We (Italy) have it, and it's awful (although it served its purpose last century).
My take is that you can't get 'unbiased news' from a government controlled TV : the most you can get is two sets of opposite very biased news (both with very little informative content).
I believe the money spent on government TV would be better spent by funding (either directly or by tax-reduction) no-profit TV, so that most modest-sized organisation can be on the air on his own. Sort of.
This "victimless crime" garbage has got to end. Music piracy is a victimless crime in the same way a war on Iraq would be a victimless crime - there are victims all right, you just can't see them, except in occasional glances the media gives as events rush past the window.
I was with you until this point, but your analogy is bad chosen, and gives strength to the same people that use the word 'piracy' (which compounds the idea of murder, tefth and worse) for what is, actually, a quite mild fraud (except that the mass effect can make it somewhat significant).
I would rather compare the unauthorised copy of protected digital contents to the insurance frauds. There are many similarities between the two.
Do not dispair.
In KDE 4.0, there will be a new kapplet for KDE kontrol (k)panel , which will allow (k)users to rename the kde applikations as they wish
The name of the new kapplet?... kalias, of course (and no, you kannot use kalias to change kalias name: Goedel would not like it ).
In a system entropy cannot decrease... basic physics
Actually, life adds entropy to the universe, and intelligence adds entropy to life. Therefore, both could be the product of evolution (or could not, I can't say).
I admin Solaris, HP-UX and AIX systems, and I'd have to say that Linux isn't significantly any differnt from them
If you take them out-of-the-box, the GNU/Linux userland is IMO _much_ better than commercial unices, in a lot of small details, like:
bash is one of the few shells that has implemented the recall of commands using the arrow keys (a la dosedit)
gzip has a much better compression rate than compress
GNU tar is the only tar (ASAIK) that does compression/decompression on the fly (and yes, I know the pipe trick) and that wisely ignores the initial '/' when unpacking an archive.
which other 'netstat' or equivalent gives you the APID and command line of the process that has open a socket?
Of couse, you can install your preferred bits of GNU userland on each sort the unix and therefore the differences are smoothed.
It is a popular opinion, with which I mostly agree, that "Software is a service, not a product". Well, one of the most used ways to pay for a service is by subscribing with the service provider.
Of course, an ideal software subscriptions model should be done for the customers, not against them, that is:
The subscription fee multiplied for the standard lifetime of a software release should be competitive with the price of the same software sold as 'bundled box product'.
The software should not 'magically' stop to work if you do not subscribe anymore. Simply you don't get updates and bug fixes.
As it has been said in other posts, it depends on the deployment and on the attack purpose.
If the attack purpose is a DOS, software diversity helps in preventing that your whole system is killed by a single exploit. But if the attack purpose is to
crack a machine on your network to run some trojan and/or spyware, software diversity only means that the attacker has more chances to find an hole.
Now, it would be different if they diversify the CPU, since most of the exploit code around is platform-dependent: keeping alive some Alphas to run some of the root DNS whould be wise from a security POV (although maybe not from other POVs).
Thinking of it, it would be nice if compilers could generate (randomly) different - but working - binary code from the same sources. You would have a single source to scrutinize for security holes, but generating different binaries on different critical machine would limit the risk of
monoculture.
I did know of the site, from where I downloaded several packages when working on Solaris. But they are 'unofficial' packages. I did not know of the CD:
last time I handled the purchase of a Sun box for my company (several years ago with Solaris 7), there was not such a thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Read here
No, to attract desktop users you need:
Eye-candy is for geeks and for people which use the computer as 'status-symbol'. Maybe still a worthing target, but different from the 'average desktop user'.
Also, let's speed up the rising of living standards in the third world, and wage will raise, too.
NO ONE is as good at shopping (if you want to call it a skill) as Americans.
Only because no-one has so much money and free time as the Americans. We in Europe are catching, but there is still a gap.
Now, speaking of people eager to shop, look at the Russians: one of them even bought an UK soccer team.
One more reason to turn the software industry in a service industry (assuming that it can be done).
Still a work in progress, but interesting.
Interesting pointers. But calling the Shared Source Licence BSD-style is a bit stretching. SSL is only free for non-commercial use, while BSD-style licenced software is free for any use (as Microsoft was happy to find out).
In any case, it is obvious to me that there are still a great many hurdles humanity must face before individuals actually have the freedom so many millions of people have died for in the last century alone.
This remember me something I read somewhere: "dying for freedom is sometime necessary to get it, but living for freedom is mandatory to keep it".
Sort of.
I don't expect (or demand) that Microsoft open up their protocol software. I just pointed out how "unbalanced" their idea of Public Domain is: for them (but not only them) it is something to take from withouth restriction, but never to contribute to.
Gates was talking about cross-licencing, basicly saying "I'm pissed off with GPL becase I cannot trade my little secrets with other little secrets (which is what IT corporations like to do) but I'm forced to do things in the open".
If they were honest in this, they would have released their own protocol implementations under a similar liberal licence. So, where is the library to handle word documents? Or the reference implementation for SMB? What about .NET?
In theory, the Linux Standard Base (LSB) should fix this problem: a package (RPM, which is the standard of commercial distro ) built against the LSB should be installable on any of the distributions that claim to be LSB-compliant (and all the recent distributions claim this).
I use Debian and do not oftten need commercial software, so I don't know how well it works in practice. Personally, I would push LSB even further, releasing an actual LSB meta-distribution, on which vendors may base their own products (like UnitedLinux, but more company-neutral).
Anyway, I don't think that many desktop commercial vendors are actually interested in porting apps to linux, otherwise they could use one of many hacks to work around missing dependencies, especially now that RAM and disk space are relatively cheap.
Also, building a middle-size App for two or three distros (RH, Suse and Mandrake cover most of the Linux market that could be interested in commercia software) is not such a big hassle, since all distros are source-compatible anyway and there is plenty of unused disk space on a CD.
it makes perfect sense for video games...
But there are other ways to implement the same model, ways that hare more respectful for the customers, because they are told the whole of it, not just treated like buying robots.
For instance, they could sell the game machine at its right price and offer to its buyers a huge discount on the first 5 (or 10) games they choose to buy. The offer would (probably) have the same appeal and would generate the same revenue than the sell_the_box_cheap_and_the_games_overpriced approach, _but_ would be more honest to the customers.
Tii many acronyms in the world...
This is not a new approach (Motif had it with UML, for instance) but lately has been neglegted in favor of code generators. I think it is time to reconsider this choice (although with OOP you have other ways to obtain the same separation).
Nothing wrong with that, Phoenix being still an alpha product. But please do not compare it with mature products, even if they are from Microsoft.
Also I don't understand why there are so many threads when nothing is going on (no download in progress and a single page shown).
Ugh! Don't, please. We (Italy) have it, and it's awful (although it served its purpose last century).
My take is that you can't get 'unbiased news' from a government controlled TV : the most you can get is two sets of opposite very biased news (both with very little informative content).
I believe the money spent on government TV would be better spent by funding (either directly or by tax-reduction) no-profit TV, so that most modest-sized organisation can be on the air on his own. Sort of.
I was with you until this point, but your analogy is bad chosen, and gives strength to the same people that use the word 'piracy' (which compounds the idea of murder, tefth and worse) for what is, actually, a quite mild fraud (except that the mass effect can make it somewhat significant).
I would rather compare the unauthorised copy of protected digital contents to the insurance frauds. There are many similarities between the two.
In KDE 4.0, there will be a new kapplet for KDE kontrol (k)panel , which will allow (k)users to rename the kde applikations as they wish
The name of the new kapplet? ... kalias, of course (and no, you kannot use kalias to change kalias name: Goedel would not like it ).
Ok, I know that one of the main goals of ISS is to learn how to create a life-supporting space abitat ... but maybe is time to rethink about it.
In a system entropy cannot decrease... basic physics
Actually, life adds entropy to the universe, and intelligence adds entropy to life. Therefore, both could be the product of evolution (or could not, I can't say).
If you take them out-of-the-box, the GNU/Linux userland is IMO _much_ better than commercial unices, in a lot of small details, like:
- bash is one of the few shells that has implemented the recall of commands using the arrow keys (a la dosedit)
- gzip has a much better compression rate than compress
- GNU tar is the only tar (ASAIK) that does compression/decompression on the fly (and yes, I know the pipe trick) and that wisely ignores the initial '/' when unpacking an archive.
- which other 'netstat' or equivalent gives you the APID and command line of the process that has open a socket?
Of couse, you can install your preferred bits of GNU userland on each sort the unix and therefore the differences are smoothed.Of course, an ideal software subscriptions model should be done for the customers, not against them, that is :
If the attack purpose is a DOS, software diversity helps in preventing that your whole system is killed by a single exploit. But if the attack purpose is to crack a machine on your network to run some trojan and/or spyware, software diversity only means that the attacker has more chances to find an hole.
Now, it would be different if they diversify the CPU, since most of the exploit code around is platform-dependent: keeping alive some Alphas to run some of the root DNS whould be wise from a security POV (although maybe not from other POVs).
Thinking of it, it would be nice if compilers could generate (randomly) different - but working - binary code from the same sources. You would have a single source to scrutinize for security holes, but generating different binaries on different critical machine would limit the risk of monoculture.
I did know of the site, from where I downloaded several packages when working on Solaris. But they are 'unofficial' packages. I did not know of the CD: last time I handled the purchase of a Sun box for my company (several years ago with Solaris 7), there was not such a thing.