Nearly. It doesn't go far enough, IMHO. Active Scripting is still there, but Microsoft have increased the security restrictions, and done some of the more obvious stuff (Like adding warning dialog boxes under certain circumstances, stripping obviously infected attachements etc.)
Scripting is still there, however. How much do you trust that there is not Yet Another Security Loophole in there somewhere?
The fact remains that if there is no scripting at all in Outlook, it will make it impossible for worms to spread themselves via. Outlook.
Well, yes they could do that. I'm sure everyone will feel safe for a couple of months, until the encryption is broken, or a loophole is discovered. Then it will be back to square one.
It would appear that a more long term solution would be to remove scripting! I have yet to see a use of scripting used within an email that could not be done if Microsoft removed scripting from Outlook. The only thing anyone ever uses is the ability to add buttons to the top of the email. You do not need a turing complete scripting language that can open sockets and read the address book to do that.
Then again, baubles and shiny things make managers with budgets happy, I guess.
support for straightforward playlisting without assuming I want to manage all my MP3s in some horrific id3 based tree widget from hell
O.K, I shall admit that the "My Music" editor does take some getting used to. I personally blame this on the craptacular playlist mangement that is present in WinAMP & XMMS, however. If you say the UI in FreeAMP is bad, what the heck are those silly little TLA labelled buttons in the WinAMP playlist "Manager"? Ick!
Once you get used to My Music in Zinf, you'll wonder how you ever managed without it. Having all of my playlists shown in one easy to navigate tree on the right hand side is a lot easier to deal with than opening a file dialog and wading through a bunch of directories to find the.m3u file I was looking for.
What Zinf seriously needs is fixed Ogg playback, and I'll be straight back. I was using FreeAMP on Linux at home, and Win NT at work, but Ogg support is more important to me now, so I have switched over to WinAMP, which has working Ogg playback. As soon as Ogg is working properly in Zinf, I'll be straight back:)
Last time I looked, Blueyonder were offering the 1Mbps service at twice the price of the standard 512Kbps service. Which means that they're charging £50 per month for a 1Mbps downstream connection.
I'm quite happy with my 512Kbps service though, so I won't be switching just yet.
doesn't the LGPL give the option of redistribution under the GPL?
No. No more than the GPL gives you the option to redistribute under the LGPL. If someone forked an LGPL project and changed it to the GPL, the original author would not be able to take the changes from the fork and fold them back into their own tree under the LGPL. Which is unfair, to say the least.
It's really nice to get quality radio on a non-traditional device. I should mention that I'm posting this from my iPAQ too:-)
Tell me about it. I've spent the last three months or so porting the emu10k1 driver to AtheOS and getting the Ogg libraries to build so I could listen to the BBC streams on my OS Of Choice. Two days after I finally got to play a live stream (Using wget & a very simple decoder), the streams are taken down. Bugger.
Do any of you get surprised about a bug in something that you get?
As a software tester, I'm not. In fact, my manager gets downright nervous if I don't find at least 5 bugs in a release. She thinks I havn't been doing my job...
Well it depends on how you define "computer". If you say Mechanical, then the Difference & Analytical engines are the first computers. If you say Electro-Mechanical, then Konrad Zuse wins. If you say Electronic with valves, then thats Turing (Which is debatable, I'll admit). If you say Electronic with transistors, then that the TX-0 & TX-2, which were built for the US Airforce (Or was it Navy? Anyone?).
This doesn't even begin to include smaller adding machines, telephone switching systems and others. Deciding wether a relay is Electronic or Electro Mechanical is contentious as well.
For the record, I'm British, so I count Babbage as the first;)
Yeah, seems like a bit of a scare tactic. I'm guessing, but I think the general idea (From Microsofts paranoid point of view), is that if you have not recieved the OEM copy of Windows that came with the PC, then the person who has donated the PC must automatically be using that copy of Windows on another PC, thus violating the EULA.
Its still a pretty big leap of logic from that to "You must only accept a PC that has the OEM copy of Windows with it" though.
You need a project leader and lots of monkeys to test it...
As a software tester, I take your assertion that testers are monkeys as an offence. Even if we do have a picture of six monkeys pined up on our manager cube with "Test Monkeys" written on it...
I have to agree, most of their ideas seemed like crap to me. Some of them though, like mouse-over contact information, split folders & more options on context menus (Although not to the level they ask for!) are sensible and not-a-bad-idea.
Tedious hacks? Tell me, how do you view meta-data in an xterm at the moment? Have you ever done ls -l in a shell? See that extra information, thats meta-data. Why would it be so hard to add a flag to ls so you can view the "content-type" meta data?
2) Drop the in-jokes please. Calling everything "GNU-" putting funny little things in the help files etc. etc. etc. we want to convince people that we're making a professional quality product. And nothing spoils that faster than giving the appearance of a hack
Yeah, we should be more profesional. Someone should really be working on the 3D landscape Easter Egg for Gnumeric. We also need some help from the guys at Winzip to help us remove all those little in jokes like "Plaid pants and paisly shirts don't mix" in the help files, thats unprofessional too.
its surprising NOBODY thinks like an enduser, it really begs the question whether the open source people are techno-elitists.
I'm sorry, but please do not tar us all with your own brush. I take pride in the ease of use of my own projects and I consider "ease of use" by an end user just as important as stability and the feature set when I develop my software.
Some of us understand the KISS principle. Many don't.
If POP has "been around for a few years now", whatever happened to the Common Hardware Reference Platform? Would POP be the phoenix from the ashes of CHRP by any chance?
I've just tried it, and it works fine. I'm amazed, that was easier than trying to get FreeAmp to play the stream (It tells me it's skipping corrupt data, methinks I don't have the Vorbis plugins installed there).
If the BBC combined the Ogg Stream with a modifed JOrbis player (This one is ugly but functional), it would be the equivilent of there current system where they use Real streams and the embedded Real Player in a window.
There is a difference between installing from source and straight binaries? Not really. Source install is a two step process. The first step is to compile binaries. Thats it.
There is no reason why 99% of applications that rely on the current configure && make && make install could not be wrapped with a graphical front end. The same "questions" you need to "answer" with the configure script can easily be represented by a multi-stage graphical front end. For example, choosing the installtion directory just becomes a -prefix= argument to the configure script. Do you want to compile with SDL or use X overlays directly? Thats a radio button which becomes a --with-sdl or --without-sdl (For example) argument.
Why would it be overkill? If the actual installer was part of your system anyway, based on say Python and Tk (As examples), then the actual installer script for each application would be a few lines of code. Applications that don't require a whole bunch of questions can just get the default installer (E.g it just asks you for the installation path) and that can simply run configure for you.
The whole point of my idea is to reinforce a previous posters comment that expecting users to open a terminal and run configure etc. from a CLI is actually a high barrier of entry for most users who are migrating from Windows. Why should we make it tough on them? Why can't we try and focus on making Linux as easy to use as possible?
Why cant we have an equivilent of setup.exe that untars the package and runs./configure && make && make install? The process the user sees would be comparable to an InstallShield installer. Open, ask a few questions, pass the answers onto configure, such as --prefix for example.
Well, lets look at the things AtheOS currently does that are different?
AFS (AtheOS File System) is 64bit & journalled. It also supports file attributes, meta data can be attached to your file as an attribute.
It has a client/server GUI model, similiar to X, but without the X overhead. The appserver is tightly integrated to the kernel (As apposed to X being loosly integrated to the Unix system)
Highlevel IPC is achieved through a flexible message system
An integrated, consistent GUI. No multiple toolkits.
A C++ API for GUI coding. GUI's & OO go together like bread & butter. Better (IMHO) than GTK+'s "C with objects" approach.
Extremly quick. Built from scratch with SMP & multi-threading in mind, and does them well.
A sensible kernel architecture. Not purely monolithic, nor anally microkernel. Drivers communicate with the kernel through a well defined API, rather than "becoming" part of the kernel as with Linux. New drivers can be installed & removed at run time just by copying them into a directory, or deleting them.
I could probably go on, but I won't. There is more on it's way too, specifically the desktop re-write will see some of the sexier features put to good use, and the media framework should rock. Anything specific you want to see first though?
Slashdot Mirror
Nearly. It doesn't go far enough, IMHO. Active Scripting is still there, but Microsoft have increased the security restrictions, and done some of the more obvious stuff (Like adding warning dialog boxes under certain circumstances, stripping obviously infected attachements etc.)
Scripting is still there, however. How much do you trust that there is not Yet Another Security Loophole in there somewhere?
The fact remains that if there is no scripting at all in Outlook, it will make it impossible for worms to spread themselves via. Outlook.
Well, yes they could do that. I'm sure everyone will feel safe for a couple of months, until the encryption is broken, or a loophole is discovered. Then it will be back to square one.
It would appear that a more long term solution would be to remove scripting! I have yet to see a use of scripting used within an email that could not be done if Microsoft removed scripting from Outlook. The only thing anyone ever uses is the ability to add buttons to the top of the email. You do not need a turing complete scripting language that can open sockets and read the address book to do that.
Then again, baubles and shiny things make managers with budgets happy, I guess.
support for straightforward playlisting without assuming I want to manage all my MP3s in some horrific id3 based tree widget from hell
.m3u file I was looking for.
:)
O.K, I shall admit that the "My Music" editor does take some getting used to. I personally blame this on the craptacular playlist mangement that is present in WinAMP & XMMS, however. If you say the UI in FreeAMP is bad, what the heck are those silly little TLA labelled buttons in the WinAMP playlist "Manager"? Ick!
Once you get used to My Music in Zinf, you'll wonder how you ever managed without it. Having all of my playlists shown in one easy to navigate tree on the right hand side is a lot easier to deal with than opening a file dialog and wading through a bunch of directories to find the
What Zinf seriously needs is fixed Ogg playback, and I'll be straight back. I was using FreeAMP on Linux at home, and Win NT at work, but Ogg support is more important to me now, so I have switched over to WinAMP, which has working Ogg playback. As soon as Ogg is working properly in Zinf, I'll be straight back
Last time I looked, Blueyonder were offering the 1Mbps service at twice the price of the standard 512Kbps service. Which means that they're charging £50 per month for a 1Mbps downstream connection.
I'm quite happy with my 512Kbps service though, so I won't be switching just yet.
As a British Citizen, I'd like to say sorry for the part the UK played in this. I quote:
Despite opposition from civil liberties groups worldwide, the European parliament bowed to pressure from individual governments, led by Britain...
In my defence, I voted Lib-Dem in the last General Election, so the current bunch of clowns are nothing to do with me...
Woops, O.K, fucked up. Section 3 of the LGPL clearly states you can fork the code under the GPL.
Dealing with all these different licencses is getting to be a PITA. GPL, LGPL, BSDL(-alikes), MPL...I give up these days!
doesn't the LGPL give the option of redistribution under the GPL?
No. No more than the GPL gives you the option to redistribute under the LGPL. If someone forked an LGPL project and changed it to the GPL, the original author would not be able to take the changes from the fork and fold them back into their own tree under the LGPL. Which is unfair, to say the least.
It's really nice to get quality radio on a non-traditional device. I should mention that I'm posting this from my iPAQ too :-)
:)
Tell me about it. I've spent the last three months or so porting the emu10k1 driver to AtheOS and getting the Ogg libraries to build so I could listen to the BBC streams on my OS Of Choice. Two days after I finally got to play a live stream (Using wget & a very simple decoder), the streams are taken down. Bugger.
Still, its kept me quiet
Do any of you get surprised about a bug in something that you get?
As a software tester, I'm not. In fact, my manager gets downright nervous if I don't find at least 5 bugs in a release. She thinks I havn't been doing my job...
Well it depends on how you define "computer". If you say Mechanical, then the Difference & Analytical engines are the first computers. If you say Electro-Mechanical, then Konrad Zuse wins. If you say Electronic with valves, then thats Turing (Which is debatable, I'll admit). If you say Electronic with transistors, then that the TX-0 & TX-2, which were built for the US Airforce (Or was it Navy? Anyone?).
;)
This doesn't even begin to include smaller adding machines, telephone switching systems and others. Deciding wether a relay is Electronic or Electro Mechanical is contentious as well.
For the record, I'm British, so I count Babbage as the first
The discs look like CDs an inch (2.5 centimeters) across and are housed in plastic cartridges.
I'm looking at my Sony Minidisc right now. The Dataplay people are joking. Right?
Yeah, seems like a bit of a scare tactic. I'm guessing, but I think the general idea (From Microsofts paranoid point of view), is that if you have not recieved the OEM copy of Windows that came with the PC, then the person who has donated the PC must automatically be using that copy of Windows on another PC, thus violating the EULA.
Its still a pretty big leap of logic from that to "You must only accept a PC that has the OEM copy of Windows with it" though.
You need a project leader and lots of monkeys to test it...
As a software tester, I take your assertion that testers are monkeys as an offence. Even if we do have a picture of six monkeys pined up on our manager cube with "Test Monkeys" written on it...
I have to agree, most of their ideas seemed like crap to me. Some of them though, like mouse-over contact information, split folders & more options on context menus (Although not to the level they ask for!) are sensible and not-a-bad-idea.
Some of these might get into later versions of my own email client
It's full of stars!
This is one of the several BeOS features that the Open Source community should reall (sic) consider stealing
Yes, I agree, we desperatly need to write a 64bit Journalled FS with Attribute meta-data support. Someone should read Dominics book and implement the ideas.
Tedious hacks? Tell me, how do you view meta-data in an xterm at the moment? Have you ever done ls -l in a shell? See that extra information, thats meta-data. Why would it be so hard to add a flag to ls so you can view the "content-type" meta data?
2) Drop the in-jokes please. Calling everything "GNU-" putting funny little things in the help files etc. etc. etc. we want to convince people that we're making a professional quality product. And nothing spoils that faster than giving the appearance of a hack
Yeah, we should be more profesional. Someone should really be working on the 3D landscape Easter Egg for Gnumeric. We also need some help from the guys at Winzip to help us remove all those little in jokes like "Plaid pants and paisly shirts don't mix" in the help files, thats unprofessional too.
its surprising NOBODY thinks like an enduser, it really begs the question whether the open source people are techno-elitists.
I'm sorry, but please do not tar us all with your own brush. I take pride in the ease of use of my own projects and I consider "ease of use" by an end user just as important as stability and the feature set when I develop my software.
Some of us understand the KISS principle. Many don't.
In the UK, CD sales are up Again. Are they going to tell us people don't use P2P systems in the UK now?
If POP has "been around for a few years now", whatever happened to the Common Hardware Reference Platform? Would POP be the phoenix from the ashes of CHRP by any chance?
Easy, you use JOrbis
I've just tried it, and it works fine. I'm amazed, that was easier than trying to get FreeAmp to play the stream (It tells me it's skipping corrupt data, methinks I don't have the Vorbis plugins installed there).
If the BBC combined the Ogg Stream with a modifed JOrbis player (This one is ugly but functional), it would be the equivilent of there current system where they use Real streams and the embedded Real Player in a window.
There is a difference between installing from source and straight binaries? Not really. Source install is a two step process. The first step is to compile binaries. Thats it.
There is no reason why 99% of applications that rely on the current configure && make && make install could not be wrapped with a graphical front end. The same "questions" you need to "answer" with the configure script can easily be represented by a multi-stage graphical front end. For example, choosing the installtion directory just becomes a -prefix= argument to the configure script. Do you want to compile with SDL or use X overlays directly? Thats a radio button which becomes a --with-sdl or --without-sdl (For example) argument.
Why would it be overkill? If the actual installer was part of your system anyway, based on say Python and Tk (As examples), then the actual installer script for each application would be a few lines of code. Applications that don't require a whole bunch of questions can just get the default installer (E.g it just asks you for the installation path) and that can simply run configure for you.
The whole point of my idea is to reinforce a previous posters comment that expecting users to open a terminal and run configure etc. from a CLI is actually a high barrier of entry for most users who are migrating from Windows. Why should we make it tough on them? Why can't we try and focus on making Linux as easy to use as possible?
Why cant we have an equivilent of setup.exe that untars the package and runs ./configure && make && make install? The process the user sees would be comparable to an InstallShield installer. Open, ask a few questions, pass the answers onto configure, such as --prefix for example.
Why would that be so difficult?
I could probably go on, but I won't. There is more on it's way too, specifically the desktop re-write will see some of the sexier features put to good use, and the media framework should rock. Anything specific you want to see first though?