Well then your boss is a fucking idiot. Imagine running a real store where you turn away 10% of your potential business, simply because they're black or chinese. It's just stupid business, especially where those customers could make the difference between bankruptcy and success. At the very least you're turning away more profit which is just as dumb. Businesses stupid enough to turn away customers who have taken the time to visit their site deserves to fail and a lot probably do.
The same for business who stupidly as to lock themselves into a single vendor for their intranet. It might mean short-term relief from writing a system that works with any reasonable endowed browser but let's see how smart it the next time Microsoft clobbers them for licence fees.
There is a difference between loving the technology (the VM, the C# language, the classes) and loving how Microsoft are applying it.
There is not a snowballs chance in hell that Microsoft would promote on.NET in any meaningful way on Linux. They might release a basic runtime on Linux so that a Windows machine can see and start/stop a few basic.NET services. They might also allow Linux users to use services running on the.NET. The important thing to note is Linux would be the client of a Windows-centric network. There is absolutely no chance of it happening the other way around. Microsoft would probably charge you a licence fee for the pleasure too.
Mono on GNOME is unlikely to help either. It will allow you to run.NET apps, but forget about it offering open source versions of various Microsoft.NET services.
I don't see it makes much difference. You still have to feed the password and data to GPG and it has to return it. Seperating GPG doesn't prevent a GTK app from leaving a copy of the password in memory for example.
Assuming PGP was open sourced and was covered by a sensible licence, it could easily steal a march over GPG.
The principle issue that faces any developer wishing to integrate GPG is that it is covered by GPL. That means that even if it had an SDK (which the isn't) you couldn't link with it without infecting your own code. Even LGPL libs can't link with it. At present if you wish to use GPG, you must mess around constructing command line arguments, opening pipes etc., invoking it and then parse the results. It is a major pain. There are libraries such as GPGME that hide some of this from you but it is still slower than running in-process and has significant issues running on platforms like Windows or Mac where piping etc. might be done differently.
If PGP were opened up with either a LGPL or BSD style licence I can see it being used in preference to GPG. GPG has the better command-line interface and might be ok for scripts but PGP has an SDK (as well as a great UI on Win32) and would be ultimately faster if software can link directly to it.
So the writers stay put and the offices move. In this day and age, any Internet company worth its salt should be able to manage people working remotely. I work in a totally different continent and timezone from my employer but I still manage.
That's not the point. If there is a control panel, at least there should be one control panel, not multiple control panels. Preferably this one control panel should put the most commonly used items in a few dialogs and hide the more advanced settings.
An example of how bad some dists are - Mandrake 8.2 has a desktop icon called "Control Center" which launches their horrendous home grown hardware config tool while KDE has a menu item, also called "Control Center" which loads KDE specific control panels. Having two "Control Center" icons is just one of many stupid things in Mandrake 8.2. And where are the control panels to control X Windows specific stuff such as screen res, mouse tracking speed etc.? The same applies for help - why do dists not integrate their help with the KDE/GNOME help?
Red Hat seems a lot better, but it's online help is pretty lame and I reckon it would be impossible to avoid the command line altogether.
All this unecessary complication puts off users big time. It should be done more like OS X - power users can still open a shell if they want or install fink for X-Windows and other Unix stuff, but the desktop is initially very simple. It's hard to imagine that it's running BSD underneath.
Of course distributors should work on usability if they want to sell more copies. Some of the usability issues in Red Hat (or Mandrake's latest UI atrocity) are down to the lack of integration between their tools, help, wizards etc. with KDE/GNOME and X11. It is simply not acceptable and I'm not surprised that novices might turn away rather than wondering why clicking on "Help" only gives you KDE help, but not help about how to connect to the internet, or why plugging in a USB camera does nothing, or why there is no obvious way to change the screen resolution.
Perhaps you'll wait for KDE/GNOME to get there but who says they're even working on this stuff? Where is it in their remit to integrate dist specific tools or help with their own. Where is it in their remit to ensure a dist doesn't clog their menus up with cryptically named crap?
None of these issues pose a problem on XP or OS X. They shouldn't on Linux either.
There is another reason - Linux on the desktop just sucks. Disributors are not putting enough work into usability. Probably they assume that their users are:
Expert enough to either not notice or be able work around the usability deficiencies
Administered
If you're a novice or more interested in using your machine for stuff than configuring it then screw you. There is no excuse for this - Mac OS X is built on BSD yet manages to provide a very nice UI so technically Linux could do the same.
The problem is a Linux desktop looks like many parts flying in a very loose formation (often on collision course). It is not acceptable to just throw out a desktop consisting of a nearly vanilla KDE/GNOME, homegrown tools, multiple help systems, multiple control panels, a few wizards and expect it to be anywhere near as easy to use a XP or OS X. The thing has to fly as a whole and its about time the distro people sat down together and put some serious thought into usability.
It is a lot more than that. The Lindows website offers hundreds of "click-n-run" applications, most of which are GPL or otherwise open source. That would be fine if the the source is available, and/or a notice states categorically their builds are from generic tarballs and where to get those, but they don't.
For all I know, they *have* modified some of these programs. For all I know they're using versions with known exploits. There is nothing to say anything to the contrary.
Does anyone know if they make the sourcecode available online and if so where? Under the GPL they could probably make it available "upon request", but I hope they're being nicer about it than that.
This is true, you're just misreading what I said. Until recently the Win32 API has *not* had a method to call to load a jpeg image. Every app that wants to load jpegs has to implement their own lib to do it. Even IE was the same, but MS have split some of that functionality out of IE and stuck it in the GDI to make it accesible to any app.
And I have a feeling that you're one of those people who can't smell bullshit. The dirty bomb story was classic bullshit - in fact Bush reprimanded Ashcroft for making such a big deal of it when it became obvious how flimsy the supposed plot, evidence and detention of the suspect were.
Sure someone has to do the other stuff which is why I mentioned mastering, but when you're shipping volumes in the millions like Harry Potter, it is still cents. If the total cost per unit for mastering, duplication, packing was more than 80 cents I would be surprised. This is much cheaper than VHS even.
Then consider they're less than half the weight/volume of a VHS so they're cheaper to ship and stock on shelves. Half the volume means they can stock double the number of titles in the same space.
They are a ripoff, plain and simple. The reason people pay the price is because they think they have to pay extra for the quality and the features. Aside from director's commentary, most features fall out of a normal movie production anyway - featurettes, trailers, deleted scenes - and some such as alternate language tracks actually drive down the costs even further since the same DVD can be sold in multiple territories.
Consumers are falling all over again for the same lame argument given when CDs came out. I don't think you can compare DVDs to laser discs because laser discs were never popular, not in the way DVDs/CDs are.
An exploit could well exist - it requires a prevalent implementation of the jpeg standard to be vulnerable to some kind of buffer overflow. It happened with WinAMP and the MP3 format recently so it could also happen with any other kind of file format.
The next question is does such an exploit exist and does it affect enough users that it could gain critical mass? The answer is probably no. Every piece of image software, emailer, browser uses it's own implementation jpeg. This is true even on Windows where there was no way to read a jpeg file via Win32 until recently. Even apps that just use libjpeg will use different versions, might be customized and compiled with different flags. So the landscape is too hetrogeneous to favour a virus.
If I had to lay money down, I would say this is McAfee playing up a threat (just like Ashcroft and dirty bombs) for their own interests.
Assume $25 is the average price of a DVD. If WB are saving 5 cents by not incorporating macrovision, that means they hope not to lose more than 1 in 500 sales to copying. That sounds reasonable.
That's sales lost - the number of copies to originals might actually be higher, but I bet most of the people watching a pirate VHS copy of a DVD would never have bought the original anyway.
Personally though I wonder how many extra DVDs they'd sell if they sold them for a fair price. A DVD costs cents to manufacture, costs less to transport than a VHS, takes up less shelf space, but sells for 150-200% of a VHS! I bet the profit margins for DVDs are double even if you add the cost of mastering and filling the disk with extras such as those crappy featurettes that they make anyway to send out in press kits and so on.
A fix was checked into the Mozilla trunk yesterday so it'll probably go into the 1.0.1 branch once approval is given. Mozilla restricts the max font size to 2 times the screen height.
Not to mention the fact that people without computers can't cut their own divx movies either. In fact not many people *with* computers would bother either, since it takes a bloody age to do from a dvd. The only alternative is to download them from somewhere via p2p which then requires a fast adsl link and takes a long time too, not to mention the question quality of whatever you're downloading.
And I like said, it isn't 1700 bugs since the bug system also tracks features and other work. A lot of work was in a holding pattern while Mozilla 1.0.0 was in feature freeze and QA. I also wonder where this 1700 figure comes from since it's not mentioned in the release notes and Bugzilla only lists 172 bugs as being fixed with a 1.1alpha target.
So how many bugs are open on IE? How do you know it's 10x as many bugs? For that matter, how do you actually raise a bug on IE if you find one? Microsoft do their best to hide that kind of information.
The fact is Internet Explorer is closed source. You have no idea how many bugs are open on it, how many are fixed between builds, the quality of patches, the quality of the code or even what features are being worked on at any given time. Mozilla allows you to do all which consequently means a lot of people are motivated to find and reports bugs and often submit patches.
Besides, a lot of the so-called bugs on mozilla are covering feature work, more deal with embedding and API cleanup, more are dupes, more are issues restricted to specific sites and more deal with issues on specific platforms. They might all be labelled "bugs" but the number of crash/non-functional/quirk issues are actually a subset.
The GBA screen is truly awful. I have to wonder what they were thinking since it's practically impossible to see the game in "normal" lighting conditions - everything is just too dark. Even with special lights, the screen is so shiny you just see glare from the lights. I have to say the screen has really turned me off the platform.
How much would it have cost them to implement a decent backlight? I doubt it would have been more than a dollar of electronics.
That is true, but at least at the moment you have a choice - anonymous cash or trackable credit card. And credit cards are a lot more private in Europe than they are in the US. Europe has a lot of laws to limit how personal information may be bought and sold by companies (a good thing).
Once pay cards get a foothold, paper money is going to go the way of the dodo. The advantages of a card are undeniable - no more fiddly change - but it must be anonymous, or at least very, very, very hard to track purchases back to a card. This isn't just for privacy reasons, but also for marketing reasons. Who's going to use a paycard if it's possible for the bank, private investigators or whoever to able see you bought haemmoroid cream with it - or bought a porn mag - or a girdle - or donated 50 euros to Greenpeace - or bought a right wing newspaper - or a double latte. People have to right to privacy no matter what governments or companies might think.
Whether it's a small part or not is a red herring. I can apply a small force to a seesaw and tip it. Mankind is doing more than applying a small force - increased CO2 emissions, deforestation, ozone depletion, pollution could all seriously screw the planet.
As for fuel cells, yes they are an alternate energy source. Read the article - methanol can be produced in any number of ways, including some such as processing organic waste which have a neutral impact on CO2 levels. Even assuming it were produced from natural gas given off during oil drilling (as the article also mentions) it would be no worse than the situation now where the gas is just burnt with no benefit to anyone.
It is ironic that one of the sleaziest, untrustworthy companies on the internet expects people to buy "trust" in the form of digital certification from them. I suggest people remember that next time they need a certificate and instead turn to one of their competitors.
Slashdot Mirror
The same for business who stupidly as to lock themselves into a single vendor for their intranet. It might mean short-term relief from writing a system that works with any reasonable endowed browser but let's see how smart it the next time Microsoft clobbers them for licence fees.
Long live Darwin.
Where is it in Lindows.com? How else might we request the source code if we want it?
There is not a snowballs chance in hell that Microsoft would promote on .NET in any meaningful way on Linux. They might release a basic runtime on Linux so that a Windows machine can see and start/stop a few basic .NET services. They might also allow Linux users to use services running on the .NET. The important thing to note is Linux would be the client of a Windows-centric network. There is absolutely no chance of it happening the other way around. Microsoft would probably charge you a licence fee for the pleasure too.
Mono on GNOME is unlikely to help either. It will allow you to run .NET apps, but forget about it offering open source versions of various Microsoft .NET services.
I don't see it makes much difference. You still have to feed the password and data to GPG and it has to return it. Seperating GPG doesn't prevent a GTK app from leaving a copy of the password in memory for example.
The principle issue that faces any developer wishing to integrate GPG is that it is covered by GPL. That means that even if it had an SDK (which the isn't) you couldn't link with it without infecting your own code. Even LGPL libs can't link with it. At present if you wish to use GPG, you must mess around constructing command line arguments, opening pipes etc., invoking it and then parse the results. It is a major pain. There are libraries such as GPGME that hide some of this from you but it is still slower than running in-process and has significant issues running on platforms like Windows or Mac where piping etc. might be done differently.
If PGP were opened up with either a LGPL or BSD style licence I can see it being used in preference to GPG. GPG has the better command-line interface and might be ok for scripts but PGP has an SDK (as well as a great UI on Win32) and would be ultimately faster if software can link directly to it.
So the writers stay put and the offices move. In this day and age, any Internet company worth its salt should be able to manage people working remotely. I work in a totally different continent and timezone from my employer but I still manage.
An example of how bad some dists are - Mandrake 8.2 has a desktop icon called "Control Center" which launches their horrendous home grown hardware config tool while KDE has a menu item, also called "Control Center" which loads KDE specific control panels. Having two "Control Center" icons is just one of many stupid things in Mandrake 8.2. And where are the control panels to control X Windows specific stuff such as screen res, mouse tracking speed etc.? The same applies for help - why do dists not integrate their help with the KDE/GNOME help?
Red Hat seems a lot better, but it's online help is pretty lame and I reckon it would be impossible to avoid the command line altogether.
All this unecessary complication puts off users big time. It should be done more like OS X - power users can still open a shell if they want or install fink for X-Windows and other Unix stuff, but the desktop is initially very simple. It's hard to imagine that it's running BSD underneath.
Perhaps you'll wait for KDE/GNOME to get there but who says they're even working on this stuff? Where is it in their remit to integrate dist specific tools or help with their own. Where is it in their remit to ensure a dist doesn't clog their menus up with cryptically named crap?
None of these issues pose a problem on XP or OS X. They shouldn't on Linux either.
If you're a novice or more interested in using your machine for stuff than configuring it then screw you. There is no excuse for this - Mac OS X is built on BSD yet manages to provide a very nice UI so technically Linux could do the same.
The problem is a Linux desktop looks like many parts flying in a very loose formation (often on collision course). It is not acceptable to just throw out a desktop consisting of a nearly vanilla KDE/GNOME, homegrown tools, multiple help systems, multiple control panels, a few wizards and expect it to be anywhere near as easy to use a XP or OS X. The thing has to fly as a whole and its about time the distro people sat down together and put some serious thought into usability.
For all I know, they *have* modified some of these programs. For all I know they're using versions with known exploits. There is nothing to say anything to the contrary.
Does anyone know if they make the sourcecode available online and if so where? Under the GPL they could probably make it available "upon request", but I hope they're being nicer about it than that.
This is true, you're just misreading what I said. Until recently the Win32 API has *not* had a method to call to load a jpeg image. Every app that wants to load jpegs has to implement their own lib to do it. Even IE was the same, but MS have split some of that functionality out of IE and stuck it in the GDI to make it accesible to any app.
And I have a feeling that you're one of those people who can't smell bullshit. The dirty bomb story was classic bullshit - in fact Bush reprimanded Ashcroft for making such a big deal of it when it became obvious how flimsy the supposed plot, evidence and detention of the suspect were.
Then consider they're less than half the weight/volume of a VHS so they're cheaper to ship and stock on shelves. Half the volume means they can stock double the number of titles in the same space.
They are a ripoff, plain and simple. The reason people pay the price is because they think they have to pay extra for the quality and the features. Aside from director's commentary, most features fall out of a normal movie production anyway - featurettes, trailers, deleted scenes - and some such as alternate language tracks actually drive down the costs even further since the same DVD can be sold in multiple territories.
Consumers are falling all over again for the same lame argument given when CDs came out. I don't think you can compare DVDs to laser discs because laser discs were never popular, not in the way DVDs/CDs are.
The next question is does such an exploit exist and does it affect enough users that it could gain critical mass? The answer is probably no. Every piece of image software, emailer, browser uses it's own implementation jpeg. This is true even on Windows where there was no way to read a jpeg file via Win32 until recently. Even apps that just use libjpeg will use different versions, might be customized and compiled with different flags. So the landscape is too hetrogeneous to favour a virus.
If I had to lay money down, I would say this is McAfee playing up a threat (just like Ashcroft and dirty bombs) for their own interests.
That's sales lost - the number of copies to originals might actually be higher, but I bet most of the people watching a pirate VHS copy of a DVD would never have bought the original anyway.
Personally though I wonder how many extra DVDs they'd sell if they sold them for a fair price. A DVD costs cents to manufacture, costs less to transport than a VHS, takes up less shelf space, but sells for 150-200% of a VHS! I bet the profit margins for DVDs are double even if you add the cost of mastering and filling the disk with extras such as those crappy featurettes that they make anyway to send out in press kits and so on.
A fix was checked into the Mozilla trunk yesterday so it'll probably go into the 1.0.1 branch once approval is given. Mozilla restricts the max font size to 2 times the screen height.
Not to mention the fact that people without computers can't cut their own divx movies either. In fact not many people *with* computers would bother either, since it takes a bloody age to do from a dvd. The only alternative is to download them from somewhere via p2p which then requires a fast adsl link and takes a long time too, not to mention the question quality of whatever you're downloading.
And I like said, it isn't 1700 bugs since the bug system also tracks features and other work. A lot of work was in a holding pattern while Mozilla 1.0.0 was in feature freeze and QA. I also wonder where this 1700 figure comes from since it's not mentioned in the release notes and Bugzilla only lists 172 bugs as being fixed with a 1.1alpha target.
So how many bugs are open on IE? How do you know it's 10x as many bugs? For that matter, how do you actually raise a bug on IE if you find one? Microsoft do their best to hide that kind of information.
The fact is Internet Explorer is closed source. You have no idea how many bugs are open on it, how many are fixed between builds, the quality of patches, the quality of the code or even what features are being worked on at any given time. Mozilla allows you to do all which consequently means a lot of people are motivated to find and reports bugs and often submit patches.
Besides, a lot of the so-called bugs on mozilla are covering feature work, more deal with embedding and API cleanup, more are dupes, more are issues restricted to specific sites and more deal with issues on specific platforms. They might all be labelled "bugs" but the number of crash/non-functional/quirk issues are actually a subset.
How much would it have cost them to implement a decent backlight? I doubt it would have been more than a dollar of electronics.
Once pay cards get a foothold, paper money is going to go the way of the dodo. The advantages of a card are undeniable - no more fiddly change - but it must be anonymous, or at least very, very, very hard to track purchases back to a card. This isn't just for privacy reasons, but also for marketing reasons. Who's going to use a paycard if it's possible for the bank, private investigators or whoever to able see you bought haemmoroid cream with it - or bought a porn mag - or a girdle - or donated 50 euros to Greenpeace - or bought a right wing newspaper - or a double latte. People have to right to privacy no matter what governments or companies might think.
The "trick" as far I can see is to put enough effort into a piece of software that a company sees the value in hiring you to work full-time on it.
As for fuel cells, yes they are an alternate energy source. Read the article - methanol can be produced in any number of ways, including some such as processing organic waste which have a neutral impact on CO2 levels. Even assuming it were produced from natural gas given off during oil drilling (as the article also mentions) it would be no worse than the situation now where the gas is just burnt with no benefit to anyone.
It is ironic that one of the sleaziest, untrustworthy companies on the internet expects people to buy "trust" in the form of digital certification from them. I suggest people remember that next time they need a certificate and instead turn to one of their competitors.