Actually, with a keyboard, as this device has, a terminal with all powerful command line tools (bash, ssh, text editor, IS very usable. Ok, being able to use multiple windows (which don't fit together on 640x480) is not very useful, but the mentioned window managers can do a lot more which can be useful to the geek and on a pda (tabs, proper keybindings etc. etc.)
Although some Gnome applications, use Bonobo, I think their USE is fairly limited. Only in Nautilus (previews of files etc.) is is actually used. Oh, and some people use VIM in Evolution, why is beyond me (what's wrong with mutt?).
Clearly if KDE and Gnome use the same mechanism for embedding (D-BUS?) things would be better.
D-Bus is not kernel functionality, but userland. Further I suspect sysfs is usable and udev not.
Am I the only one, who thinks IBM gets too much free advertising on./ lately? (or just the only one who isn't ignoring these advertorials?)
Ok, they are the target of a riduculous case of SCO, so airtime related to that is fine for me.
But their still just one company, embracing linux. It is nice, that a large company does that, but I think we know that already (for years!) So please posters, be a little bit more critical against articles, like this.
And don't forget this: Of course they can't specify the code in question because they don't have access to it, so SCO is asking IBM for the AIX code to compare it to the Linux kernel to validate their claims.
But nevertheless they file a 1 billion dollar law-suit. Pretty strange isn't it?
Mmm, but then why didn't first file a case for looking into the AIX code (if IBM didn't show them it immediately), before filing for something which is perhaps not a case (they can only tell if they already saw the infringing code).
I don't think judges like a gamble game with their time.
Yes it did. I get proper OpenGL acceleration on my Linux box now.
That is true and an advantage. Unfortunately the drawbacks are perhaps larger (depends on your opinion). An open driver with the same performance would be better (but perhaps impossible).
You know, if the installer cannot find pre-compiled drivers for your card, it will compile them for you. How's that for service?
Nope, only the interface around the binary core is compiled, not the driver itself.
Yeah, right. Have you ever read through the code of your LAN card driver, too? How about the USB controller and SCSI-card? Most important of all, how many driver exploits have you heard of either in Windows or Linux?
Yes, I have. Lots of others have done this too. Being able to look up the source in case of network troubles is really a great help. The debug mode of the driver is very helpful, the source even better.
IANAMOI (I am not a minister of information), but I am still convinced that you can regard the GPL as more free than public domain software.
Perhaps not for the end user, but for a developer this is certainly the case. The GPL gives me the freedom to see changes made to my software done by a (proprietary) company. Public domain software does not grant me this freedom.
And yet another one who doesn't understand sarcasm...
[obvious] There are far less mistakes (and more importantly misconceptions from being experienced to a certain DE) in this article than in the average 'I tried linux' article', but at least this author knows he is joking. [/obvious]
What the author of the post you replied, probably meant, was that if the performance of a certain filesystem with samba is in a lot of cases more important than the performance of the file system pur sang, because lots of linux fileservers must be connected with window clients.
Anyway, the same accounts for DB-servers, etc. etc.
Yup, that is bad. If I came to your country and gave away free bread for a few years, until all bakers were become butchers and after that I was going to sell very expensive breads, would that be ethical (or even legal)?
I run linux only, but see no real problems with the quality of Windows 2000 when I have to work with it. Sometimes (small) problems arise, just as with my favourite linux distro. I run linux, because it works and has better tools for me, but I thinks Microsoft have also usable software.
However, I am against the methods described in this article. Microsoft is leveraging their wealth (and thus their monopoly), which is unfair competition. That is the real problem here, not the quality or whatever.
No, but I do think, once the open source hype is a bit over, or companies are more aggresively pushing proprietary again (after they let it slip a bit over the last years), lots of new code extending a BSD product will be proprietary and the 'good' version is locked again. Then the efforts have to be doubled again by open source developers. Which is a waste.
This sounds perhaps hypothetical, but look at some companies tactics, who want to sell open source (Suse and Lindows come to mind, but there are more). The GPL really helps keeping free software free.
All "GPL==restrictive", "BSD license=free" posts are real nonsense! Where are the arguments for that?
The GPL and FreeBSD licenses are restrictive to users in almost the same way. They can use software under both licences free (once they obtained it), make changes and let everyone copy it. Only difference is that the BSD license asks to leave the advertisement intact and the GPL to provide source code.
But then you are already on a developing level. The only difference between the licenses is on this level. This does not make one license more restrictive than the other, the restrictions are just different! The GPL say you give changes backs (restriction for the company further developing the source) and the BSD license restricts the developer (the developer can not develop further on his own source if a company patched a few lines proprietarily).
Anyway the government buys/gets a product and uses it, so the GPL does not restrict them.
However companies are restricted, so they don't want to deal with GPL (as in article), but developer are restriced with BSD license, so they (hopefully..) want to use the GPL.
The framebuffer works for me fine in 2.5.69? I have patched the source a bit for a proper default resolution/refresh rate (nasty...), but before that it already worked in 1024x768 (NVIDIA).
However notice that the fbset is not updated for the new kernel, so don't use it.
Nope, you and some others here are wrong. Latex can do all the stuff Quark can. Before computers were powerful enough for Indesign/Quark/Pagemaker etc troff already provided a proper layout engine.
Furthermore the nature of *nix is that all small tools for converting and incorporating other bits are already there (multichanneling ancestor awk and such).
However it is not easy! If I want some sort of strange envelop format I have to do some programming, if I want some weird color calibration idem. And I think I can do most stuff, however... I can't make a nice layout. The people who can do that can't use latex the way I do.
There is definately a use for Quark and consorts and that is (relative..) usefriendliness without too much hacking.
But do not underestimate the value of latex+unix tools.
When the first Ximian Desktop was released it was certainly better than Redhat's Gnome. With XD2, compared to Redhat 9, I think the difference is smaller.
Nevertheless I still like what Ximian does. Their Open Office and Gnome patches are still good. I will just wait for Redhat to include them. This because running a distro and Ximian Desktop and upgrading packages from different sources gave me a lot of nasty problems in the past (Redhat explicitly tells to uninstall Ximian in their release notes). However I do not know how that will be with this release...
If you read the interview it was clear that the main advantage for using Ximian will not be for the home user, but for large corporations. Better application management/more consistency and real user problems solving.
Nevertheless I think Ximian is a nice open source company, providing the communuity with good patches and Evolution and help adoption of linux. So props to them anyway!
Nat admits his mistake in the interview in the comments:
I wasn't lying, but I wasn't very clear either. What I meant was that GNOME was the first project to have a documented set of human interface guidelines, *and* to have a usability team that enforces those guidelines across the desktop. This has given us a pretty high level of UI consistency, which I think shows. (Now, if this happens to be wrong, I'm still not lying -- I'm just wrong, but I don't think that I am:-).
Yes, someone who measures his room response and compensates for this (real-time is a bit overkill?) is better off. But hey, people don't want to do this. (if you want something for linux, look at this program for a start).
Also the whole press statement is a buzzword hype indeed. The words on the lense technique don't make sense, but the company who filed the patent knows their technology is not perfect, but can help a little, read their PDF's. Also the author done some serious research, although you need access to the AES library to read his articles (which I have:-).
It is not a standard horn technique (as a compresssion driver, (JBL 2445 and such)), merely a craftly construced baffle. Nothing world shocking, but perhaps their is some truth in it (anybody heard a demo of this?).
Perhaps there is some truth in the report, I am not a samba expert, but the timeline of this is interesting.
Testing Samba against Windows IS important, quotes about NFS for Windows are bit stupid here. Linux is used as a Windows file server a lot. And Linux was much better in this! This report showed that NT4 was faster than Samba. However (read the comments) it was a very bad test and the results tuned to lie. Actually (follow links in the comments) it was proven that Samba was much faster then NT4 in file serving under load (which happens most of the time).
Samba remained the fastest SMB implementation when windows 2000 came out. Finally when building Windows Server 2003, they were annoyed with that and did everything to fix this. Read for example the interview in this post, where a microsoft developer admits that Windows was slower in file serving then samba.
Now they tested the new Windows Server 2003 against an old (2.4.x) kerneled Red Hat system. It would not be too strange if Microsoft is faster now, but when linux has a new kernel and the Samba developers perhaps also tune some more, perhaps Samba is faster again.
So what I wanted to point out with this comment: This shows competition is a good thing!
I read your post, because I thought to have the same opinion: Microsoft software can have obscure exploits, just like every other (also open source) program, but this is really WAY to stupid. How can something this important to your company be SO easily exploitable??.
But I answer because your security idea of web apps is also very terrifying. Security through obscurity does not work! (passing variabless in headers is no security, and choosing weird names is bad coding practice and not more secure). Proper way is to put in the url what you need (?page_nr=3) and keep at the server the stuff that is only used after proper authentication. Perhaps at a very unknown website obscurity would delay the script kiddies a bit, but I think hackers are really to much motivated to hack Passport, to not try something other then IE (telnet passport.microsoft.com 80?).
But I'm glad you are a system administrator who knows how to secure his/her machines, those people are also too rare....
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, with a keyboard, as this device has, a terminal with all powerful command line tools (bash, ssh, text editor, IS very usable. Ok, being able to use multiple windows (which don't fit together on 640x480) is not very useful, but the mentioned window managers can do a lot more which can be useful to the geek and on a pda (tabs, proper keybindings etc. etc.)
We'll see what future brings, but you are actually right, it is not meant as a replacement per se. But
m l? start=96
http://www.advogato.org/person/murrayc/diary.ht
D-BUS is meant as a replacement for Bonobo.
Although some Gnome applications, use Bonobo, I think their USE is fairly limited. Only in Nautilus (previews of files etc.) is is actually used. Oh, and some people use VIM in Evolution, why is beyond me (what's wrong with mutt?).
Clearly if KDE and Gnome use the same mechanism for embedding (D-BUS?) things would be better.
D-Bus is not kernel functionality, but userland. Further I suspect sysfs is usable and udev not.
Am I the only one, who thinks IBM gets too much free advertising on ./ lately? (or just the only one who isn't ignoring these advertorials?)
Ok, they are the target of a riduculous case of SCO, so airtime related to that is fine for me.
But their still just one company, embracing linux. It is nice, that a large company does that, but I think we know that already (for years!) So please posters, be a little bit more critical against articles, like this.
And don't forget this: Of course they can't specify the code in question because they don't have access to it, so SCO is asking IBM for the AIX code to compare it to the Linux kernel to validate their claims.
But nevertheless they file a 1 billion dollar law-suit. Pretty strange isn't it?
Mmm, but then why didn't first file a case for looking into the AIX code (if IBM didn't show them it immediately), before filing for something which is perhaps not a case (they can only tell if they already saw the infringing code).
I don't think judges like a gamble game with their time.
YANAL, that's obvious.
Yes it did. I get proper OpenGL acceleration on my Linux box now.
That is true and an advantage. Unfortunately the drawbacks are perhaps larger (depends on your opinion). An open driver with the same performance would be better (but perhaps impossible).
You know, if the installer cannot find pre-compiled drivers for your card, it will compile them for you. How's that for service?
Nope, only the interface around the binary core is compiled, not the driver itself.
Yeah, right. Have you ever read through the code of your LAN card driver, too? How about the USB controller and SCSI-card? Most important of all, how many driver exploits have you heard of either in Windows or Linux?
Yes, I have. Lots of others have done this too. Being able to look up the source in case of network troubles is really a great help. The debug mode of the driver is very helpful, the source even better.
Indeed, there all slashot readers have only one opinion. Very strange the editors put so much effort in creating a moderation system at all?
What's up, are trolls now moderating their friends up to +3 Insightful, instead of posting their own trolls?
I suspect that on a SMP machine linux 2.6 will beat 4.9 performance wise ;-)?
IANAMOI (I am not a minister of information), but I am still convinced that you can regard the GPL as more free than public domain software.
Perhaps not for the end user, but for a developer this is certainly the case. The GPL gives me the freedom to see changes made to my software done by a (proprietary) company. Public domain software does not grant me this freedom.
And yet another one who doesn't understand sarcasm...
[obvious]
There are far less mistakes (and more importantly misconceptions from being experienced to a certain DE) in this article than in the average 'I tried linux' article', but at least this author knows he is joking.
[/obvious]
What the author of the post you replied, probably meant, was that if the performance of a certain filesystem with samba is in a lot of cases more important than the performance of the file system pur sang, because lots of linux fileservers must be connected with window clients.
;-)
Anyway, the same accounts for DB-servers, etc. etc.
Please think before you flame
Yup, that is bad. If I came to your country and gave away free bread for a few years, until all bakers were become butchers and after that I was going to sell very expensive breads, would that be ethical (or even legal)?
I run linux only, but see no real problems with the quality of Windows 2000 when I have to work with it. Sometimes (small) problems arise, just as with my favourite linux distro. I run linux, because it works and has better tools for me, but I thinks Microsoft have also usable software.
However, I am against the methods described in this article. Microsoft is leveraging their wealth (and thus their monopoly), which is unfair competition. That is the real problem here, not the quality or whatever.
No, but I do think, once the open source hype is a bit over, or companies are more aggresively pushing proprietary again (after they let it slip a bit over the last years), lots of new code extending a BSD product will be proprietary and the 'good' version is locked again. Then the efforts have to be doubled again by open source developers. Which is a waste.
This sounds perhaps hypothetical, but look at some companies tactics, who want to sell open source (Suse and Lindows come to mind, but there are more). The GPL really helps keeping free software free.
All "GPL==restrictive", "BSD license=free" posts are real nonsense! Where are the arguments for that?
The GPL and FreeBSD licenses are restrictive to users in almost the same way. They can use software under both licences free (once they obtained it), make changes and let everyone copy it. Only difference is that the BSD license asks to leave the advertisement intact and the GPL to provide source code.
But then you are already on a developing level. The only difference between the licenses is on this level. This does not make one license more restrictive than the other, the restrictions are just different! The GPL say you give changes backs (restriction for the company further developing the source) and the BSD license restricts the developer (the developer can not develop further on his own source if a company patched a few lines proprietarily).
Anyway the government buys/gets a product and uses it, so the GPL does not restrict them.
However companies are restricted, so they don't want to deal with GPL (as in article), but developer are restriced with BSD license, so they (hopefully..) want to use the GPL.
The framebuffer works for me fine in 2.5.69? I have patched the source a bit for a proper default resolution/refresh rate (nasty...), but before that it already worked in 1024x768 (NVIDIA).
However notice that the fbset is not updated for the new kernel, so don't use it.
Nope, you and some others here are wrong. Latex can do all the stuff Quark can. Before computers were powerful enough for Indesign/Quark/Pagemaker etc troff already provided a proper layout engine.
Furthermore the nature of *nix is that all small tools for converting and incorporating other bits are already there (multichanneling ancestor awk and such).
However it is not easy! If I want some sort of strange envelop format I have to do some programming, if I want some weird color calibration idem. And I think I can do most stuff, however... I can't make a nice layout. The people who can do that can't use latex the way I do.
There is definately a use for Quark and consorts and that is (relative..) usefriendliness without too much hacking.
But do not underestimate the value of latex+unix tools.
When the first Ximian Desktop was released it was certainly better than Redhat's Gnome. With XD2, compared to Redhat 9, I think the difference is smaller.
Nevertheless I still like what Ximian does. Their Open Office and Gnome patches are still good. I will just wait for Redhat to include them. This because running a distro and Ximian Desktop and upgrading packages from different sources gave me a lot of nasty problems in the past (Redhat explicitly tells to uninstall Ximian in their release notes). However I do not know how that will be with this release...
If you read the interview it was clear that the main advantage for using Ximian will not be for the home user, but for large corporations. Better application management/more consistency and real user problems solving.
Nevertheless I think Ximian is a nice open source company, providing the communuity with good patches and Evolution and help adoption of linux. So props to them anyway!
I wasn't lying, but I wasn't very clear either. What I meant was that GNOME was the first project to have a documented set of human interface guidelines, *and* to have a usability team that enforces those guidelines across the desktop. This has given us a pretty high level of UI consistency, which I think shows. (Now, if this happens to be wrong, I'm still not lying -- I'm just wrong, but I don't think that I am :-).
Yes, someone who measures his room response and compensates for this (real-time is a bit overkill?) is better off. But hey, people don't want to do this. (if you want something for linux, look at this program for a start).
:-).
Also the whole press statement is a buzzword hype indeed. The words on the lense technique don't make sense, but the company who filed the patent knows their technology is not perfect, but can help a little, read their PDF's. Also the author done some serious research, although you need access to the AES library to read his articles (which I have
It is not a standard horn technique (as a compresssion driver, (JBL 2445 and such)), merely a craftly construced baffle. Nothing world shocking, but perhaps their is some truth in it (anybody heard a demo of this?).
Perhaps there is some truth in the report, I am not a samba expert, but the timeline of this is interesting.
Testing Samba against Windows IS important, quotes about NFS for Windows are bit stupid here. Linux is used as a Windows file server a lot. And Linux was much better in this!
This report showed that NT4 was faster than Samba. However (read the comments) it was a very bad test and the results tuned to lie. Actually (follow links in the comments) it was proven that Samba was much faster then NT4 in file serving under load (which happens most of the time).
Samba remained the fastest SMB implementation when windows 2000 came out. Finally when building Windows Server 2003, they were annoyed with that and did everything to fix this. Read for example the interview in this post, where a microsoft developer admits that Windows was slower in file serving then samba.
Now they tested the new Windows Server 2003 against an old (2.4.x) kerneled Red Hat system. It would not be too strange if Microsoft is faster now, but when linux has a new kernel and the Samba developers perhaps also tune some more, perhaps Samba is faster again.
So what I wanted to point out with this comment: This shows competition is a good thing!
I read your post, because I thought to have the same opinion: Microsoft software can have obscure exploits, just like every other (also open source) program, but this is really WAY to stupid. How can something this important to your company be SO easily exploitable??.
....
But I answer because your security idea of web apps is also very terrifying. Security through obscurity does not work! (passing variabless in headers is no security, and choosing weird names is bad coding practice and not more secure). Proper way is to put in the url what you need (?page_nr=3) and keep at the server the stuff that is only used after proper authentication. Perhaps at a very unknown website obscurity would delay the script kiddies a bit, but I think hackers are really to much motivated to hack Passport, to not try something other then IE (telnet passport.microsoft.com 80?).
But I'm glad you are a system administrator who knows how to secure his/her machines, those people are also too rare
That's nice from Apple, I also hope they will continue to send BSD-styled code back, even if they are not obliged to.
Thanks for the information.