I use it today and I could easiy written what you said in the preceding paragraph about it! Nothing's changed. The lousy piece of crap works at a snail's pace through a VPN even with a 2mb ADSL connection because it is so bursty.
But 2.95 and 3.0 can live on the same box as can 3.x and 4.0. Where's the problem?
Fix or don't fix your code. I doubt for the most part that updating to be more standards compliant it is a bad thing anyway. Not everyone uses gcc after all.
I agree. I use Clearcase at work and I think it is the worst source control system I have ever used. It's slow, baroque, massively expensive, and really doesn't do much that most companies need or require.
What I would dispute is that people would suddenly stop paying McVoy $$$ if he had made the product open source. Other open source projects make a fortune because the source is not enough for many deployments - they want features, support and training. I bet the various sql servers and JBoss do very well out of such an arrangement.
As an open source product BitKeeper would have gotten 10x the exposure it does now. It would be the defacto source control system since people would have migrated to Bitkeeper from cvs years ago, and their enthusiasm would have "infected" the corporate workplace too. I really think it was a dumb move to make the product commercial.
As it is, the open source world has passed Bitkeeper by. It might be a good system but Clearcase is still king and sooner or later something will supplant Bitkeeper. I'd still love it if my company picked Bitkeeper but there's fat chance of that despite the millions they spend on clearcase - source control systems are very "sticky" and hard to get rid of.
I haven't used Arch or Monotone, but I appreciate the concept of a change control set. One thing I miss from the days of CMVC (what IBM *used* to use prior to Clearcase) was that you'd check out files against a bug and check the whole lot in in one action. You can do atomic commits in svn, but it's not mandatory or tied to a bug system. Some kind of uber-distributed-svn-bugzilla could kick some serious ass.
You say that, but I suspect that is Larry McVoy had just open sourced the thing from the beginning, everyone would be using it instead of looking longingly over at Subversion.
How would he make his money? The same way that Trolltech (eventually), PostgresSQL, MySQL, JBoss, or Aladdin make theirs - by offering a GPL version, but offering paid support or spiffy new features in a commercial version.
The ubiquity of CVS (despite its many faults) demonstrates that some could make an absolute fortune this way and be the darling of the open source world at the same time.
... make the third film seem even worse than I imagined. It's just yet more CGI, laid on with thick trowel. It's almost as Lucas has heard the criticism of the first two films, concluded that this one will realise his vision (when it won't) and ploughed on regardless. "Hey we didn't get the CG right last time, so let's put even more in!".
Now CG can work when it's seamless, but CG for CG's sake stopped being fun a long time ago. It wouldn't be so bad if it looked realistic but it doesn't.
Adobe should simply say "go fuck yourselves Nikon". Word will soon get around that Nikon cameras suck because they force you to use their crappy software because of proprietary formats rather than industry standard tools.
So in other words you're saying host an entire Linux session to get an app to work or recompile it. How is that any different from running an ActiveX control under VMWare, or recompiling it against winelib?
(1) It does not work cross-platform. Both Firefox and OpenOffice work on platforms other than Windows. Both platforms keep this compatibility by not introducin technology that could possibly limit this capability.
Plugins are not cross-platform either. The API might be more or less platform neutral (although there are differences), but everything behind that API is absolutely platform-specific. A flash plugin won't play on Linux if its compiled to Windows because the small part dealing with the API (which could be ActiveX or NPAPI) attaches to a huge other part that is intimately tied to various GDI calls, multimedia etc.
Neither is XPCOM cross-platform. Most of the interfaces and IDL are designed to be cross-platform, but the implementations of those interfaces are natively compiled and at the lower levels make platform specific calls. For example nsILocalFile is implemented multiple times, once for each platform. Even Gecko's use of XPCOM only covers so much ground - once you start looking at the graphics / rendering aspects of Gecko you realise XPCOM has given way to a mess of pseudo-XPCOM (with ref counting abuse and handwritten C++ interfaces) and native C++ classes. This is definitely not for public consumption and definitely not portable either.
Secondly, both OpenOffice and Firefox do support platform specific features. For example, the native theme engine, drag and drop, clipboard. On Windows, Firefox supports shortcuts, mime types, DDE launching & printing, MSAA accessibility.
There would be nothing to stop Firefox supporting ActiveX controls. It wouldn't have to impact on its cross-platform abilities in other areas. In fact the Netscape 7.2 browser actually does support certain ActiveX controls so its quite possible to achieve.
I think the crossover plugin has support from some ActiveX controls via a plugin. Or whoever wrote the control could port it via winelib. Though of course someone could turn the question around and ask - does a natively compiled Linux application run on Windows?
AxtiveX is the Microsoft API in answer to Java. It lacks sandbox execution so any ActiveX embedded code can trivially access anything on Windows. The reason even microsoft doesn't think you should blindly execute any activeX component is that it is equivalent to a local binary in terms of system access.
Making it absolutely no different from any other binary format - a.out, ELF etc. ActiveX is unsafe for untrusted HTML content, but it is a perfectly legitimate and safe (as safe as any other binary format) for producing apps that run locally.
The problem is not ActiveX controls but the manner in which IE fetches and installs them from the Internet. Once that is switched off or restricted to the intranet, there is no safety issue.
Linspire users are deemed to be dumb (by their CEOs implicit admission) to handle the concept of an admin password. In other words, they're easy marks for phishers.
Therefore a simple malicious attack might be easy to pull off - just scrape for email addresses and Linspire in the same page and mass email them all a trojan. Using the appropriate social engineering techniques, direct them all to a hacked ClickNRun site or promise them an extra year's free sub if they download and run the attached survey programme.
You can see where I'm going with this. Let's see what happens to the "no one explaine why root is insecure" argument after the hilarity ensues.
Well, here's one of those philosophical differences then... Why doesn't 'rm' put forth an extra warning when you delete a directory named "/etc"? Or any of the "system" directory paths known to be important?
Well I'm supposing you actually mean KDE since its most likely that the user would rearrange their machine from there... But rm does have a check to prevent directory deletion but its overridden with a switch. If you say "rm/etc" nothing happens. You must say "rm -rf" to forcibly and recursively delete what you tell it to.
But on KDE, how should it know what is safe to delete and what isn't? After all, you're running as root so you can delete everything. I don't use KDE so perhaps it has some kind of crude checks already that warn you when you start dragging/etc,/usr,/sbin into the trashcan. But how does KDE know that some-random-file is safe for deletion when another one isn't? In a perfect world (which Linspire isn't since it wouldn't in this mess if it were), perhaps access controls are enabled and KDE might be able to figure it out what is a system file, or the group might be "system" or something. But that requires every package install using those controls which I rather doubt Linspire does either.
For day to day use, there is absolutely no reason at all to be root. In fact doing so is as people have said likely to see you (or some trojan) screw your machine in an irreparable way.
OS X has it right in this regard. Even the administrator runs as a normal user for most of the time. If they want to install something such as an update, they must use sudo to do it. At the very least that means that trojans have an extra hoop to jump through.
On Windows (or Linspire) if the vast majority of users are running with root it presents a much more attactive attack surface. Aside from that, it prevents users from themselves - e.g. stopping some dumb user from cleaning up their machine like deleting etc/ for example.
Michael Robertson should know this. In fact I suspect he does know this and employs this kind of rhetoric because Linspire has traditionally thrown all the security switches to make it one of the least secure Unices ever. At least it offers you the choice of a logon and password which is a start. Really though Linspire should adopt the Mac model. The fact that OS X makes it virtually transparent means that it's not a massive burden on the user to figure out.
Even from a business perspective, less destroyed machines and less exploits is obviously good sense. But who knows - perhaps Linspire loves support calls for the revenue they generate.
OpenTTD is even worse example of an open source game that FreeCIV. Okay, so it runs and does what it says on the tin, but only because it uses the original Transport Tycoons data files! It's literally just a new front-end for an existing game.
It's understandable why it came about (TT is a great game & Chris Sawyer seems to write code which never works properly on newer systems), but even so...
Sad but true. I'd say a better example of a modern open source game (though some would say the term is misplaced here) would be something like FlightGear. Yes in a sense it's treading the same ground as FlightSim but it's not a clone or a ripoff - it's a thing in its own right with a large community around it.
What all modern open source games lack though is decent content and polish. There have been some great classical text games (e.g. rogue, mud, nethack etc.) but this hasn't translated well to the new world of graphics and 3D.
Surely there must be designers and artists willing to produce content to go with a game engine?
All I know is that on my 1.8Ghz PC, that if I'm burning a DVD and I let that buffer run down to 0% I get in trouble. The buffer provides 5 seconds or so worth of breathing space and starting a big app like OpenOffice is enough to kill it.
It's not trolling to state the bleeding obvious. Besides, it'd only be trolling if the average Slashdot reader was a godbothering fundie. Since they're not, I thought I was on safe ground. Oh well.
I doubt it. As with past gospels (and there have been many), they'll simply be ignored. After all, the bible is the Word of God, even if it is massively edited, retranslated, and so replete with errors and contradiction that you'd have to be mad to believe that. Of course, fundies aren't exactly known for their reasoning powers.
Okay, I got asked a while back why anyone would need a second CPU - it's not like the CPU usage for 1 is ever 100% is it?. Actually it is for me - frequently - and I suspect it is for others too if they:
Develop software. Building Mozilla will quite happily consume most of your CPU for the good part of an hour.
Burn CDs or DVDs. Burners are very CPU sensitive. I've burned a DVDs before now, absent mindedly launched something like OpenOffice, and discovered the act has turned the DVD into an expensive coaster because the buffer was emptied.
Run a virus / spyware / Norton system check. Damn, these things are slow on a modern OS with a large disk and drag down everything else while they running.
Run a VMWare / QEMU / DOSBox / CoLinux session. By design these things simply eat the cycles while they're running.
Run Seti or other distributed computing apps. Two CPUs mean these things are less frequently pre-empted.
Play or rip music. Especially Ogg format, but it applies to anything else too.
Recode DVDs. Another CPU intensive and very long operation.
Play games. Yes, believe it or not games often spawn secondary threads for the background music, networking and housekeeping operations.
Run any kind of multi-threaded intensive application whatsoever. If your machine runs a Firefox, a DB, Apache, Java for example. Even a seemingly innocuous Java app like Puzzle Pirates spawns 20+ threads and consumes > 100% CPU on my dual CPU mac.
If you do any of these things more than occasionally you would benefit from a second CPU or core. Does that mean I'd pay the prices that a dual core Intel costs now? No chance. The prices are a rip off. But once the cost becomes more realistic, I'd certainly pay some more if it effectively doubled the performance of my machine when doing any of the tasks above.
Yes, it's easy to download MIDI files from the internet for any song you like. In fact I would not be surprised if that's exactly where half these ringtone firms get theirs.
Fortunately my phone has bluetooth and file transfer. But I've heard of horror stories where the bluetooth has been crippled to disable that feature. That in my view is immoral.
First off I'd argue that it's not a major OS upgrade. It's a point upgrade with a few new apps, bug fixes and a few new APIs. And secondly Microsoft do give out major APIs for older platforms. e.g..NET, DirectX, IE. The usual pattern in fact is to support their operating systems until they're end-of-lifed which is five years or more.
So Windows 2000 is up next for end of life, but it remains a perfectly acceptable OS, supported by virtually every game, hardware and software maker out there.
Can you say the same for Mac OS X? I be surprised if any software still supports 10.0, if more than a small number supported 10.1, with the bulk being 10.2(+patches)-10.3 only. With 10.4 it will shift again. In other words, people who bought 10.1 got about 3 years before their version was defacto dumped.
As I happen to own both types of machine (and some running Linux as well), I can assure you that Apple force me to upgrade far more often than Microsoft do. In case you think I'm being unfair to Apple, I believe Red Hat / Novell are just as bad with their distributions - I got a lousy 10 months out of RH9 before it got shitcanned.
Slashdot Mirror
When I heard that I nearly fell off my ostrich.
I use it today and I could easiy written what you said in the preceding paragraph about it! Nothing's changed. The lousy piece of crap works at a snail's pace through a VPN even with a 2mb ADSL connection because it is so bursty.
Fix or don't fix your code. I doubt for the most part that updating to be more standards compliant it is a bad thing anyway. Not everyone uses gcc after all.
Robert Kilroy Silk. Need I say more?
What I would dispute is that people would suddenly stop paying McVoy $$$ if he had made the product open source. Other open source projects make a fortune because the source is not enough for many deployments - they want features, support and training. I bet the various sql servers and JBoss do very well out of such an arrangement.
As an open source product BitKeeper would have gotten 10x the exposure it does now. It would be the defacto source control system since people would have migrated to Bitkeeper from cvs years ago, and their enthusiasm would have "infected" the corporate workplace too. I really think it was a dumb move to make the product commercial.
As it is, the open source world has passed Bitkeeper by. It might be a good system but Clearcase is still king and sooner or later something will supplant Bitkeeper. I'd still love it if my company picked Bitkeeper but there's fat chance of that despite the millions they spend on clearcase - source control systems are very "sticky" and hard to get rid of.
I haven't used Arch or Monotone, but I appreciate the concept of a change control set. One thing I miss from the days of CMVC (what IBM *used* to use prior to Clearcase) was that you'd check out files against a bug and check the whole lot in in one action. You can do atomic commits in svn, but it's not mandatory or tied to a bug system. Some kind of uber-distributed-svn-bugzilla could kick some serious ass.
How would he make his money? The same way that Trolltech (eventually), PostgresSQL, MySQL, JBoss, or Aladdin make theirs - by offering a GPL version, but offering paid support or spiffy new features in a commercial version.
The ubiquity of CVS (despite its many faults) demonstrates that some could make an absolute fortune this way and be the darling of the open source world at the same time.
The UKIP needn't worry though. The party is replete with arseholes, bigots, eccentrics, xenophobes and nutcases.
Now CG can work when it's seamless, but CG for CG's sake stopped being fun a long time ago. It wouldn't be so bad if it looked realistic but it doesn't.
And the GIMP, and Quark, and ... etc.
Adobe should simply say "go fuck yourselves Nikon". Word will soon get around that Nikon cameras suck because they force you to use their crappy software because of proprietary formats rather than industry standard tools.
So in other words you're saying host an entire Linux session to get an app to work or recompile it. How is that any different from running an ActiveX control under VMWare, or recompiling it against winelib?
Plugins are not cross-platform either. The API might be more or less platform neutral (although there are differences), but everything behind that API is absolutely platform-specific. A flash plugin won't play on Linux if its compiled to Windows because the small part dealing with the API (which could be ActiveX or NPAPI) attaches to a huge other part that is intimately tied to various GDI calls, multimedia etc.
Neither is XPCOM cross-platform. Most of the interfaces and IDL are designed to be cross-platform, but the implementations of those interfaces are natively compiled and at the lower levels make platform specific calls. For example nsILocalFile is implemented multiple times, once for each platform. Even Gecko's use of XPCOM only covers so much ground - once you start looking at the graphics / rendering aspects of Gecko you realise XPCOM has given way to a mess of pseudo-XPCOM (with ref counting abuse and handwritten C++ interfaces) and native C++ classes. This is definitely not for public consumption and definitely not portable either.
Secondly, both OpenOffice and Firefox do support platform specific features. For example, the native theme engine, drag and drop, clipboard. On Windows, Firefox supports shortcuts, mime types, DDE launching & printing, MSAA accessibility.
There would be nothing to stop Firefox supporting ActiveX controls. It wouldn't have to impact on its cross-platform abilities in other areas. In fact the Netscape 7.2 browser actually does support certain ActiveX controls so its quite possible to achieve.
I think the crossover plugin has support from some ActiveX controls via a plugin. Or whoever wrote the control could port it via winelib. Though of course someone could turn the question around and ask - does a natively compiled Linux application run on Windows?
AxtiveX is the Microsoft API in answer to Java. It lacks sandbox execution so any ActiveX embedded code can trivially access anything on Windows. The reason even microsoft doesn't think you should blindly execute any activeX component is that it is equivalent to a local binary in terms of system access.
Making it absolutely no different from any other binary format - a.out, ELF etc. ActiveX is unsafe for untrusted HTML content, but it is a perfectly legitimate and safe (as safe as any other binary format) for producing apps that run locally.
The problem is not ActiveX controls but the manner in which IE fetches and installs them from the Internet. Once that is switched off or restricted to the intranet, there is no safety issue.
Linspire users are deemed to be dumb (by their CEOs implicit admission) to handle the concept of an admin password. In other words, they're easy marks for phishers.
Therefore a simple malicious attack might be easy to pull off - just scrape for email addresses and Linspire in the same page and mass email them all a trojan. Using the appropriate social engineering techniques, direct them all to a hacked ClickNRun site or promise them an extra year's free sub if they download and run the attached survey programme.
You can see where I'm going with this. Let's see what happens to the "no one explaine why root is insecure" argument after the hilarity ensues.
Well I'm supposing you actually mean KDE since its most likely that the user would rearrange their machine from there... But rm does have a check to prevent directory deletion but its overridden with a switch. If you say "rm
But on KDE, how should it know what is safe to delete and what isn't? After all, you're running as root so you can delete everything. I don't use KDE so perhaps it has some kind of crude checks already that warn you when you start dragging
OS X has it right in this regard. Even the administrator runs as a normal user for most of the time. If they want to install something such as an update, they must use sudo to do it. At the very least that means that trojans have an extra hoop to jump through.
On Windows (or Linspire) if the vast majority of users are running with root it presents a much more attactive attack surface. Aside from that, it prevents users from themselves - e.g. stopping some dumb user from cleaning up their machine like deleting etc/ for example.
Michael Robertson should know this. In fact I suspect he does know this and employs this kind of rhetoric because Linspire has traditionally thrown all the security switches to make it one of the least secure Unices ever. At least it offers you the choice of a logon and password which is a start. Really though Linspire should adopt the Mac model. The fact that OS X makes it virtually transparent means that it's not a massive burden on the user to figure out.
Even from a business perspective, less destroyed machines and less exploits is obviously good sense. But who knows - perhaps Linspire loves support calls for the revenue they generate.
It's understandable why it came about (TT is a great game & Chris Sawyer seems to write code which never works properly on newer systems), but even so...
http://www.freecol.org/
What all modern open source games lack though is decent content and polish. There have been some great classical text games (e.g. rogue, mud, nethack etc.) but this hasn't translated well to the new world of graphics and 3D.
Surely there must be designers and artists willing to produce content to go with a game engine?
All I know is that on my 1.8Ghz PC, that if I'm burning a DVD and I let that buffer run down to 0% I get in trouble. The buffer provides 5 seconds or so worth of breathing space and starting a big app like OpenOffice is enough to kill it.
It's not trolling to state the bleeding obvious. Besides, it'd only be trolling if the average Slashdot reader was a godbothering fundie. Since they're not, I thought I was on safe ground. Oh well.
I doubt it. As with past gospels (and there have been many), they'll simply be ignored. After all, the bible is the Word of God, even if it is massively edited, retranslated, and so replete with errors and contradiction that you'd have to be mad to believe that. Of course, fundies aren't exactly known for their reasoning powers.
- Develop software. Building Mozilla will quite happily consume most of your CPU for the good part of an hour.
- Burn CDs or DVDs. Burners are very CPU sensitive. I've burned a DVDs before now, absent mindedly launched something like OpenOffice, and discovered the act has turned the DVD into an expensive coaster because the buffer was emptied.
- Run a virus / spyware / Norton system check. Damn, these things are slow on a modern OS with a large disk and drag down everything else while they running.
- Run a VMWare / QEMU / DOSBox / CoLinux session. By design these things simply eat the cycles while they're running.
- Run Seti or other distributed computing apps. Two CPUs mean these things are less frequently pre-empted.
- Play or rip music. Especially Ogg format, but it applies to anything else too.
- Recode DVDs. Another CPU intensive and very long operation.
- Play games. Yes, believe it or not games often spawn secondary threads for the background music, networking and housekeeping operations.
- Run any kind of multi-threaded intensive application whatsoever. If your machine runs a Firefox, a DB, Apache, Java for example. Even a seemingly innocuous Java app like Puzzle Pirates spawns 20+ threads and consumes > 100% CPU on my dual CPU mac.
If you do any of these things more than occasionally you would benefit from a second CPU or core. Does that mean I'd pay the prices that a dual core Intel costs now? No chance. The prices are a rip off. But once the cost becomes more realistic, I'd certainly pay some more if it effectively doubled the performance of my machine when doing any of the tasks above.Fortunately my phone has bluetooth and file transfer. But I've heard of horror stories where the bluetooth has been crippled to disable that feature. That in my view is immoral.
So Windows 2000 is up next for end of life, but it remains a perfectly acceptable OS, supported by virtually every game, hardware and software maker out there.
Can you say the same for Mac OS X? I be surprised if any software still supports 10.0, if more than a small number supported 10.1, with the bulk being 10.2(+patches)-10.3 only. With 10.4 it will shift again. In other words, people who bought 10.1 got about 3 years before their version was defacto dumped.
As I happen to own both types of machine (and some running Linux as well), I can assure you that Apple force me to upgrade far more often than Microsoft do. In case you think I'm being unfair to Apple, I believe Red Hat / Novell are just as bad with their distributions - I got a lousy 10 months out of RH9 before it got shitcanned.