doh. The format bug only causes crashes (I still didn't find out how that should leave you "root"...?) Running "del *.*" on keypress sounds much more efficient and sophisticated to me!
I mean, c'mon, never seen a core dump? It usually doesn't take me that much nastiness:-)
Cause I guess it is "normal" c behaviour to accept printf (foo); , whatever foo is? And how can you make sure, from a library, whether or not foo has evil intentions?
Then again... if you guys get an error message instead of a core dump on badly formatted strings, I might consider to move to BSD... So often I thought that %d[ecimal] was %n[umber], and my proggies crashed of it!
It's actually cool that the *BSD folks claim this can NOT happen w. them. Is then EVERY line of BSD code checked? -- I'm willing to believe that, though, but what I am not willing to believe, is that OpenBSD for instance also checks out MySQL (an external program, I believe?) for you. And Sendmail. Just to name 2 out of thousands of external programs.
Thou art not safe unless thou only sets up the basic system,that actually can't do very much useful by itself (except for playing router or so). Well, I personally prefer to install some apps now and then, though;-)
That was the locale problem, yes. But as pointed out in some other replies here, it seems that it can affect _any_ program w. external input.
Say, I make a remote client, it reads your login name, and password, and then says:
printf ("Hello %s%s,", name, "this is your name again:"); # no problem
printf (name); # problem
'cause if I say that my name is "%d asdf" or so, this might cause troubles. Maybe there are more ways to harm than just exploit this weakly set up printf statement, but this is the example of above, and because in my example we are talking about a "remote client", I have demonstrated to you that this is not just a local problem;-)
So it's not just a _local_ "locale" thingy, it's all over.
Hi,
For the sake of completeness, a Point Of View from the other side.
What RMS says, is that if you violate the GPL, you loose the rights to use the software with which you did this. This would legally mean, that anyone who has used KDE, may not use it anymore. This is a technical problem, which RMS tries to solve.
OK, the problem is absurd -- but it is a valid problem!
So why do I say "KDE is arrogant"? Well, first, to get you to read this post, of course;-) But second, for this:
- Qt was non-free. KDE said: no problem.
- Qt got free. KDE said: nice, now we can solve the problem that we DIDN'T HAVE in the first place.
- Linking GPL'ed code to Qt remained a problem. KDE said: no problem.
- Qt got GPL. KDE said: nice, now we can solve the other NON-EXISTING problem.
While during this COMPLETE period of time, all that was needed from the KDE side (and NOT from the Troll Tech side), was a note from the developers of KDE, stating that you MAY link this software with QT.
Which the lazy buts never wanted to write, because they claimed that there WAS no such problem. Instead, Troll Tech had to resolve the problem. Hey, they're not responsible for this at all! All they make is a toolkit, that is being "abused" by KDE!
And now, KDE goes on by saying that there is no problem, except for a few problems of the past that never existed anyway, but have been solved nevertheless. With the same arrogance, they claim that GNOME was set up to be anti-KDE and nothing more.... Geesh, sometimes it seems that KDE is being developed in a country where the word for "Legalities" is the same as that for "toilet paper"...
Heck, so what if I lose my karma in exchange for some truth...
I can't imagine that Corel Update doesn't use QT and does use GTK+ + GNOME. Seems like enough reason to me.
And umm, I don't mean to start GNOME & KDE flames with this. You should agree with me that a consistent environment is important, be it KDE or GNOME. So there's some sense in "sticking to your own toolkit":-)
I have been using Debian, but use RedHat now. And I can still recognise each and every security complaint in this article.
-/home/*/ is world readable. Well, I remember that this was part of Debian's philosophy of an open system; almost all files in a Debian install are world-readable. Please don't ask me why - I can only recall reading that it was part of their philosophy. But it is, at least practically, the same with RedHat; because they also use/home/*/public_html for the ~* Apache directory. So if you user dir would've been rwx------, you would change it to rwxrwxr-x yourself just to be able to have a website of your own. At least I did in my ignorance, and let that be a proof that other idiots will do this as well. BTW, I have access to an OpenBSD machine, here also all files are world-readable.
- inetd and daemons open. I am glad that this is critisized. Because Unix is so proud of its connectivity etc., it often wants to show off that running a lot of connectivity apps by default is "standard" and "normal". In my RedHat inetd.conf, there are a whole lot of things open that I've never even heard of, but of which I don't know what will happen when I switch them off. And the daemons... well, don't speak about the things RedHat 6.0 launches;-) This attitude needs changing.
- The signed packages thing has luckily become an issue with Debian. But as shown, AFAIK, you have to check for signs in RedHat by hand. It would have been better if somehow you package system detects the problems and alarms. Now THAT would mean something. But the trust we have in automatic upgrades makes us very vulnerable, indeed.
BTW, it's funny how -x works for a directory. I never knew. Actually it works kind of strange; you can list all files, but you cannot have any further information on these files (e.g. ls -l). You can't delete the dir. Strange. Should't -w and -r have a little more logical effect? In other words, what's the special use of -x?
You can use the Aqua themes for GNOME if you want. There are prolly also ones for KDE. OK, you don't get the requester animations, but for me, it's close enough.
Amiga will not open old AmigaOS code. For a free AmigaOS (3.x-like) implementation, see http://www.aros.org/ . It rocks and is MPL.
A normal mouse sometimes slips. The result is that no matter how hard you try, your pointer won't moved. Being in the spell of this interaction, I always start squishing and pushing the mouse because it seems that it it stuck. This always leaves me with a sore hand.
And now this! A mouse that is/made/ to refuse. Yuck!
In a followup to his previous stupid article, Fred Moody dared to call the entire Linux community a set of morons just because they complain about him writing FUD messages supported by his miscalculations from bugtraq data. (Bugtraq themselves have reacted that this were miscalculations and that is was an unreliable method of determining the security of an OS anyway.)
Part of this has been on Slashdot, and we've all been angry together. Oh BTW, in his followup, the Moody even talks bad about Slashdot.
I think that the current Piranha vs. SQL Server article should make something clear to this man. Here's to hope that it becomes clear to his employer first, and that they fire him with a bick kick in the rear as a finishing touch. It's people like him that spoil the media.
Why are we all complaining that Nautilus doesn't look "revolutionar" enough? What had we expected? HAL2000?
What we must get used to, is that this is the first time that a company is making something _good_ for all the "grandmothers" out there, and make some _publication_ around it. Look at M$. They call everything "technologies". When something is new in Windows, it is "revolutionar". And people listen to that crap.
We could use some of that rumour. And we could use a superb component integration system, and a shell that fully utilizes it. (If you feel too nerdy to use it, then let it be just for granny.) And we're gonna get it!
Sidenote: I know people that would DIE for BeOS. But I won't. You know why? Not because of the shell. Not because of the OO layer underneath. But because file browsing is quite a pain in the ass (*all* navigation via a menu, desktop icons are unreachable, etc.). Now I like GMC because navigation becomes more useful (I use the shell most often, BTW). With Nautilus, navigation becomes an adventure through your Linux system. Call it a tour.
Just think of how easy this will be for first-timers, when they get this superb visual representation of the system. They will be, unknowingly, touring themselves through the odds and ends of the system, and will probably learn some very useful things underway (such as the "hard" file permission system, by seeing the permissions visualized on the icons, and stuff like that).
Finally some program that could bring us some more users that don't like to read thick books just to learn something.
Mozilla writes "The staff at mozilla.org have decided to go forward with an attempt to relicense the code contained at cvs.mozilla.org under an MPL-GPL dual license."
If this would include neat tools like Bonzai and Bugzilla - already heavily in use with GPL projects such as GNOME, but always having been a little bit of "outsiders" to me because of the licensing - well, that'd be NICE too!
P.S.: Are there/.tters that SUCCEED in posting with the "Extrans" option? (Works fine with e.g. Gnotices, but here I only get plain text. Why? - this comment was submitted HTML formatted)
Add "doing a Netscape" to the English dictionary! I think it is a cool and clear term:-)
(Definition: something like "giving the competition a major blow by opensourcing your software after it has become clear that you are on the edge of bankrupcy".)
My uncle had a CD with GNU/ Hurd on it, from a LUG (actually it was a UUG). The CD also contained the latest Mandrake, BSD's etc. He was only interested in Mandrake, so he couldn't tell me much about GNU/ Hurd.
Could you inform me what the steps are to get a GNU/ Hurd (experimental) *distro*? Or doesn't such a thing yet exists (so has this UUG been fooling around with the CD's ISO themselves)?
Addittionaly, Debian has once made Debian/ FreeBSD. But I never see ISO's of that either. I don't really get that.
Off course there are experimental packages lying around, with installation instructions attached to them, but that's not what I am looking for (is also interesting, though). I only wonder if there is a simple CD-based distro of these variants of Debian.
I once read a piece where some kid turned to RMS and talked to him about this. RMS replied that it was something he sacrified in the license.
In fact I don't think that he cares. And I also couldn't imagine why Troll Tech would care. So what if someone makes an in-house app based on your software? As long as they don't redistribute it. I can't see how it would harm Troll Tech if I used Qt for my virtual company's administration system.
Something that RMS also said (more or less), was that if you act on this point, you actually sacrify the freedom to USE the software in any way you want (because in-house dev. is a form of using, not redistributing). I am very glad I don't have to give anyone any changes I make to my Linux box - heck, it could be a cheap encryption system, or any other lame security code that I see fit to use myself, but that would be totally unsecure when people can demand to see it.
So if you start asking for people's in-house code, I think you're actually on the edge of privacy.
If don't tell you something because it is plain UNIMPORTANT, then that is not CENSORing. That is SELECTIVEness.
CENSORing is FORBIDding people to tell unimportant things. SELECTIVEness is making out for yourself what is important to listen to and to pass on. Even the moderations system of Slashdot isn't CENSORing; it is also SELECTIVEness (no matter if you agree with it or don't).
I could imagine that Slashdot tries to select stories that are INTERESTING and not PLAIN STUPID. Otherwise, they could even bring the contents of my Website as news, which, as I explained, they DON'T, and I totally agree with it, because it simply isn't INTERESTING.
But I have to admit that the "why does/. post this for C's sake" tone is also getting somewhat boring:-)
It seems that the LHWLA-PPM (Linux Haters With Lousy Arguments - Probably Payed by Microsoft) party has gained some momentum lately. Bad News or Good News?
Well, I imagine that you see the Dark Side of this yourself, so let me direct you to the Good Side of all this. A little analysis:
- Criticism on Linux seems to be growing. Good News: they say that "high trees catch much wind". So we must conclude that Linux has become a "high tree".
- But the quality of the criticism seems to go down at an *enormous* rate. This is also Good News: apparently there is not much to criticize about Linux itself anymore.
In the early days, comments like "Linux is just plain *hard*" were often-heard and reasonable complaints, but nowadays only a few LHWLA-PPM's come up with their bark (remember that stupid that did his "Linux is unsafe" Bugtraq "analysis"?).
(So what. We have their names. We will find their addresses. They WILL change their opinions }:-)
The only thing I wonder is: why is/. paying attention. If I put on my website some story about "Windows sux", I don't get reviewed at MSN news or so, too. (Even if I wrote an essay "Linux sux",/. wouldn't link to it, I guess.) So what makes the authors of these pieces so important when it's obvious that their stories. wouldn't even survive common Slashdot moderation?
One thing I have always wondered, is if the X Consortium is still willing to change the specs of the X Window System to address current problems.
Most problems today are being addressed (we have seen this story, and recently the one of Jim Gettys who believes X is ideal for pocket devices, if only some of the "bloat" code that slipped into XFree over the years would be revisited), if only because of the popularity of Linux for graphics-intensive tasks.
But most of the solutions provided are extentions to X11. Even though it is nice that X11 is made so extensible, this still means that a standard X11 setup uses none of these extentions, practically bringing us back to the mainframe ages: even transparency (heavily relied upon by some window managers, I guess) seems to be such an extention.
Now in my humble opinion, the X Consortium could release a new spec, in which they call the most well-known and useful extentions more or less official, and in which they would probably provide some more solutions as well. This can be done without breaking radically with current X implementations, thanks to the extension system, while it would take away the "officially, this can't be done with X" complaints.
(Maybe X12 would be the wrong name, because it would be a mere upgrade to the X11 spec, with backwards compatibility, so something like X11R7 or X11R6.5?)
Would the X Consortium still consider changes in their specs, or have they merely become the maintaners of a historical document? I am just asking because during the young times I have been with UNIX, it has always been X11R6.4 (or maybe X11R6.3 too?). So I actually don't know how active the Consortium is.
Not for any particular reason, but I think that "microsoft" underwear would lead to a LOAD of confusion:-)
(The company would have a long day to explain that the name really isn't inspired by MickeySoft, but instead means something like MicroCell Technology Soft Textile.)
It's not California at all, mister! It is Holland. Some folks at our national television try to attract some IT'ers.
The bills were all around the place some time ago. I liked them.
www.omroep.nl is the united website of national broadcasters. And Hilversum is the place where they make TV in holland (like Hollywood, only VERY different:-) Besides, it's TV, not film)
You are completely right. Your comparision makes it all clear: even though pretty women look like they have more love in them than "ugly" women, there are a lot of pretty "bitches" out there.
Same counts probably for the Mac and Linux: though the Mac gives you more of "that lovin' feelin'", it isn't necessarily made with more spirit and love than Linux.
That's exactly why I use Linux: I know that the software "cares".
But that is also exactly why a lot of folks appreciate the Mac: because it at leest *seems* that the software "cares" more, while Linux sometimes seem to behave like your enemy.
Which it is not, but try to convince them when they don't see a smiley at startup anymore:-)
...and that's why they're so negative about their first Linux experience. I know a load of Maccers. They don't care about Free as in Speech as a Linux guru does. They don't care about power as much as we do. What they care about is usability, friendliness, beauty and style.
These are often small points, that even a Miguel de Icaza should not see (I imagine), just because he is used to Unix, to "RTFM!" and/etc textfiles.
For instance: when you type in a console, and the program is actually busy and not accepting input, your input will still be repeated on screen. (This is extremely nice when your shell loads in "su" and you already start ticking your password.)
Also, we are often distracted by the Windows version of usability. Even GNOME, a project that does a lot of things good in my eyes, pops up messages with "Are you sure you want to...?" now and then.
This is not BAD, but it is one of these small things. I remember my first Windows experience, after having used an Amiga for a time. "Are you sure you want to logout?" No, I'm not, but I still do it.
"No."
Damn! Still running! How can I logout, like, "maybe"?
Sun does this a lot of better: they ask "Please confirm your exit from the desktop session." I click "OK" and I am gone.
Another small thing: when a Mac hits a serious error (which happens only in emulators, I guess), it *apologizes* in the error message, like:
"Sorry, but an error has occored." followed by more information.
Well, see a person who is used to all these nice things get through a Debian install. Or even a graphical install -- for "graphical" doesn't directly mean easy, intuitive and user-friendly. And even though currently user-friendliness focusses on installation, there's a big lack of maintenance-tools user-friendliness. (e.g. try to add a remote Samba printer in Debian.) IMHO a program as Linuxconf only adds to the confusion. It begat buggy beyond repair here, anyway. What's the use of that?
No, I have seen Mac's and I love them, because you really get the feeling that it is a work of true love to the user, when you sit behind it. But I'd rather not depend on a single company for "love", and that keeps me to Linux:-)
But if the folks at GNOME really want to make a super-product, they should not only spy on Microsoft and try to improve that. They should also actively spy at Apple. For they have some very unique approaches to software design. (Not that I don't trust the GNOME folks; they have made some very good decisions IMHO!)
Slashdot Mirror
doh. The format bug only causes crashes (I still didn't find out how that should leave you "root"...?) Running "del *.*" on keypress sounds much more efficient and sophisticated to me!
:-)
I mean, c'mon, never seen a core dump? It usually doesn't take me that much nastiness
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Tell me, what makes this glibc specific?
Cause I guess it is "normal" c behaviour to accept printf (foo); , whatever foo is? And how can you make sure, from a library, whether or not foo has evil intentions?
Then again... if you guys get an error message instead of a core dump on badly formatted strings, I might consider to move to BSD... So often I thought that %d[ecimal] was %n[umber], and my proggies crashed of it!
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It's actually cool that the *BSD folks claim this can NOT happen w. them. Is then EVERY line of BSD code checked? -- I'm willing to believe that, though, but what I am not willing to believe, is that OpenBSD for instance also checks out MySQL (an external program, I believe?) for you. And Sendmail. Just to name 2 out of thousands of external programs.
,that actually can't do very much useful by itself (except for playing router or so). Well, I personally prefer to install some apps now and then, though ;-)
Thou art not safe unless thou only sets up the basic system
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That was the locale problem, yes. But as pointed out in some other replies here, it seems that it can affect _any_ program w. external input.
;-)
Say, I make a remote client, it reads your login name, and password, and then says:
printf ("Hello %s%s,", name, "this is your name again:"); # no problem
printf (name); # problem
'cause if I say that my name is "%d asdf" or so, this might cause troubles. Maybe there are more ways to harm than just exploit this weakly set up printf statement, but this is the example of above, and because in my example we are talking about a "remote client", I have demonstrated to you that this is not just a local problem
So it's not just a _local_ "locale" thingy, it's all over.
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Ermm... Link dynamically: it gets you a smaller executable. And, like, you can still access shared library functions.
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Hi, For the sake of completeness, a Point Of View from the other side. What RMS says, is that if you violate the GPL, you loose the rights to use the software with which you did this. This would legally mean, that anyone who has used KDE, may not use it anymore. This is a technical problem, which RMS tries to solve. OK, the problem is absurd -- but it is a valid problem! So why do I say "KDE is arrogant"? Well, first, to get you to read this post, of course ;-) But second, for this:
- Qt was non-free. KDE said: no problem.
- Qt got free. KDE said: nice, now we can solve the problem that we DIDN'T HAVE in the first place.
- Linking GPL'ed code to Qt remained a problem. KDE said: no problem.
- Qt got GPL. KDE said: nice, now we can solve the other NON-EXISTING problem.
While during this COMPLETE period of time, all that was needed from the KDE side (and NOT from the Troll Tech side), was a note from the developers of KDE, stating that you MAY link this software with QT.
Which the lazy buts never wanted to write, because they claimed that there WAS no such problem. Instead, Troll Tech had to resolve the problem. Hey, they're not responsible for this at all! All they make is a toolkit, that is being "abused" by KDE!
And now, KDE goes on by saying that there is no problem, except for a few problems of the past that never existed anyway, but have been solved nevertheless. With the same arrogance, they claim that GNOME was set up to be anti-KDE and nothing more.... Geesh, sometimes it seems that KDE is being developed in a country where the word for "Legalities" is the same as that for "toilet paper"...
Heck, so what if I lose my karma in exchange for some truth...
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I can't imagine that Corel Update doesn't use QT and does use GTK+ + GNOME. Seems like enough reason to me.
:-)
And umm, I don't mean to start GNOME & KDE flames with this. You should agree with me that a consistent environment is important, be it KDE or GNOME. So there's some sense in "sticking to your own toolkit"
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I have been using Debian, but use RedHat now. And I can still recognise each and every security complaint in this article.
/home/*/ is world readable. Well, I remember that this was part of Debian's philosophy of an open system; almost all files in a Debian install are world-readable. Please don't ask me why - I can only recall reading that it was part of their philosophy. But it is, at least practically, the same with RedHat; because they also use /home/*/public_html for the ~* Apache directory. So if you user dir would've been rwx------, you would change it to rwxrwxr-x yourself just to be able to have a website of your own. At least I did in my ignorance, and let that be a proof that other idiots will do this as well. BTW, I have access to an OpenBSD machine, here also all files are world-readable.
;-) This attitude needs changing.
-
- inetd and daemons open. I am glad that this is critisized. Because Unix is so proud of its connectivity etc., it often wants to show off that running a lot of connectivity apps by default is "standard" and "normal". In my RedHat inetd.conf, there are a whole lot of things open that I've never even heard of, but of which I don't know what will happen when I switch them off. And the daemons... well, don't speak about the things RedHat 6.0 launches
- The signed packages thing has luckily become an issue with Debian. But as shown, AFAIK, you have to check for signs in RedHat by hand. It would have been better if somehow you package system detects the problems and alarms. Now THAT would mean something. But the trust we have in automatic upgrades makes us very vulnerable, indeed.
BTW, it's funny how -x works for a directory. I never knew. Actually it works kind of strange; you can list all files, but you cannot have any further information on these files (e.g. ls -l). You can't delete the dir. Strange. Should't -w and -r have a little more logical effect? In other words, what's the special use of -x?
Greets,
Stefan
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You can use the Aqua themes for GNOME if you want. There are prolly also ones for KDE. OK, you don't get the requester animations, but for me, it's close enough.
Amiga will not open old AmigaOS code. For a free AmigaOS (3.x-like) implementation, see http://www.aros.org/ . It rocks and is MPL.
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A normal mouse sometimes slips. The result is that no matter how hard you try, your pointer won't moved. Being in the spell of this interaction, I always start squishing and pushing the mouse because it seems that it it stuck. This always leaves me with a sore hand.
/made/ to refuse. Yuck!
And now this! A mouse that is
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In a followup to his previous stupid article, Fred Moody dared to call the entire Linux community a set of morons just because they complain about him writing FUD messages supported by his miscalculations from bugtraq data. (Bugtraq themselves have reacted that this were miscalculations and that is was an unreliable method of determining the security of an OS anyway.)
Part of this has been on Slashdot, and we've all been angry together. Oh BTW, in his followup, the Moody even talks bad about Slashdot.
I think that the current Piranha vs. SQL Server article should make something clear to this man. Here's to hope that it becomes clear to his employer first, and that they fire him with a bick kick in the rear as a finishing touch. It's people like him that spoil the media.
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It cores with me. Prolly because I don't have Mozilla installed? On one reaload, I thought I was able to see "View as Core" as an option :-)
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Heya,
Why are we all complaining that Nautilus doesn't look "revolutionar" enough? What had we expected? HAL2000?
What we must get used to, is that this is the first time that a company is making something _good_ for all the "grandmothers" out there, and make some _publication_ around it. Look at M$. They call everything "technologies". When something is new in Windows, it is "revolutionar". And people listen to that crap.
We could use some of that rumour. And we could use a superb component integration system, and a shell that fully utilizes it. (If you feel too nerdy to use it, then let it be just for granny.) And we're gonna get it!
Sidenote: I know people that would DIE for BeOS. But I won't. You know why? Not because of the shell. Not because of the OO layer underneath. But because file browsing is quite a pain in the ass (*all* navigation via a menu, desktop icons are unreachable, etc.). Now I like GMC because navigation becomes more useful (I use the shell most often, BTW). With Nautilus, navigation becomes an adventure through your Linux system. Call it a tour.
Just think of how easy this will be for first-timers, when they get this superb visual representation of the system. They will be, unknowingly, touring themselves through the odds and ends of the system, and will probably learn some very useful things underway (such as the "hard" file permission system, by seeing the permissions visualized on the icons, and stuff like that).
Finally some program that could bring us some more users that don't like to read thick books just to learn something.
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If this would include neat tools like Bonzai and Bugzilla - already heavily in use with GPL projects such as GNOME, but always having been a little bit of "outsiders" to me because of the licensing - well, that'd be NICE too!
P.S.: Are there /.tters that SUCCEED in posting with the "Extrans" option? (Works fine with e.g. Gnotices, but here I only get plain text. Why? - this comment was submitted HTML formatted)
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Add "doing a Netscape" to the English dictionary! I think it is a cool and clear term :-)
(Definition: something like "giving the competition a major blow by opensourcing your software after it has become clear that you are on the edge of bankrupcy".)
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My uncle had a CD with GNU/ Hurd on it, from a LUG (actually it was a UUG). The CD also contained the latest Mandrake, BSD's etc. He was only interested in Mandrake, so he couldn't tell me much about GNU/ Hurd.
Could you inform me what the steps are to get a GNU/ Hurd (experimental) *distro*? Or doesn't such a thing yet exists (so has this UUG been fooling around with the CD's ISO themselves)?
Addittionaly, Debian has once made Debian/ FreeBSD. But I never see ISO's of that either. I don't really get that.
Off course there are experimental packages lying around, with installation instructions attached to them, but that's not what I am looking for (is also interesting, though). I only wonder if there is a simple CD-based distro of these variants of Debian.
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I once read a piece where some kid turned to RMS and talked to him about this. RMS replied that it was something he sacrified in the license.
In fact I don't think that he cares. And I also couldn't imagine why Troll Tech would care. So what if someone makes an in-house app based on your software? As long as they don't redistribute it. I can't see how it would harm Troll Tech if I used Qt for my virtual company's administration system.
Something that RMS also said (more or less), was that if you act on this point, you actually sacrify the freedom to USE the software in any way you want (because in-house dev. is a form of using, not redistributing). I am very glad I don't have to give anyone any changes I make to my Linux box - heck, it could be a cheap encryption system, or any other lame security code that I see fit to use myself, but that would be totally unsecure when people can demand to see it.
So if you start asking for people's in-house code, I think you're actually on the edge of privacy.
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Well, guess I'm a little too ignorant sometimes :-)
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No Stupid.
/. post this for C's sake" tone is also getting somewhat boring :-)
If don't tell you something because it is plain UNIMPORTANT, then that is not CENSORing. That is SELECTIVEness.
CENSORing is FORBIDding people to tell unimportant things. SELECTIVEness is making out for yourself what is important to listen to and to pass on. Even the moderations system of Slashdot isn't CENSORing; it is also SELECTIVEness (no matter if you agree with it or don't).
I could imagine that Slashdot tries to select stories that are INTERESTING and not PLAIN STUPID. Otherwise, they could even bring the contents of my Website as news, which, as I explained, they DON'T, and I totally agree with it, because it simply isn't INTERESTING.
But I have to admit that the "why does
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It seems that the LHWLA-PPM (Linux Haters With Lousy Arguments - Probably Payed by Microsoft) party has gained some momentum lately. Bad News or Good News?
/. paying attention. If I put on my website some story about "Windows sux", I don't get reviewed at MSN news or so, too. (Even if I wrote an essay "Linux sux", /. wouldn't link to it, I guess.) So what makes the authors of these pieces so important when it's obvious that their stories. wouldn't even survive common Slashdot moderation?
Well, I imagine that you see the Dark Side of this yourself, so let me direct you to the Good Side of all this. A little analysis:
- Criticism on Linux seems to be growing. Good News: they say that "high trees catch much wind". So we must conclude that Linux has become a "high tree".
- But the quality of the criticism seems to go down at an *enormous* rate. This is also Good News: apparently there is not much to criticize about Linux itself anymore.
In the early days, comments like "Linux is just plain *hard*" were often-heard and reasonable complaints, but nowadays only a few LHWLA-PPM's come up with their bark (remember that stupid that did his "Linux is unsafe" Bugtraq "analysis"?).
(So what. We have their names. We will find their addresses. They WILL change their opinions }:-)
The only thing I wonder is: why is
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Hi,
One thing I have always wondered, is if the X Consortium is still willing to change the specs of the X Window System to address current problems.
Most problems today are being addressed (we have seen this story, and recently the one of Jim Gettys who believes X is ideal for pocket devices, if only some of the "bloat" code that slipped into XFree over the years would be revisited), if only because of the popularity of Linux for graphics-intensive tasks.
But most of the solutions provided are extentions to X11. Even though it is nice that X11 is made so extensible, this still means that a standard X11 setup uses none of these extentions, practically bringing us back to the mainframe ages: even transparency (heavily relied upon by some window managers, I guess) seems to be such an extention.
Now in my humble opinion, the X Consortium could release a new spec, in which they call the most well-known and useful extentions more or less official, and in which they would probably provide some more solutions as well. This can be done without breaking radically with current X implementations, thanks to the extension system, while it would take away the "officially, this can't be done with X" complaints.
(Maybe X12 would be the wrong name, because it would be a mere upgrade to the X11 spec, with backwards compatibility, so something like X11R7 or X11R6.5?)
Would the X Consortium still consider changes in their specs, or have they merely become the maintaners of a historical document? I am just asking because during the young times I have been with UNIX, it has always been X11R6.4 (or maybe X11R6.3 too?). So I actually don't know how active the Consortium is.
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Not for any particular reason, but I think that "microsoft" underwear would lead to a LOAD of confusion :-)
(The company would have a long day to explain that the name really isn't inspired by MickeySoft, but instead means something like MicroCell Technology Soft Textile.)
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It's not California at all, mister! It is Holland. Some folks at our national television try to attract some IT'ers.
:-) Besides, it's TV, not film)
The bills were all around the place some time ago. I liked them.
www.omroep.nl is the united website of national broadcasters. And Hilversum is the place where they make TV in holland (like Hollywood, only VERY different
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You are completely right. Your comparision makes it all clear: even though pretty women look like they have more love in them than "ugly" women, there are a lot of pretty "bitches" out there.
:-)
Same counts probably for the Mac and Linux: though the Mac gives you more of "that lovin' feelin'", it isn't necessarily made with more spirit and love than Linux.
That's exactly why I use Linux: I know that the software "cares".
But that is also exactly why a lot of folks appreciate the Mac: because it at leest *seems* that the software "cares" more, while Linux sometimes seem to behave like your enemy.
Which it is not, but try to convince them when they don't see a smiley at startup anymore
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...and that's why they're so negative about their first Linux experience. I know a load of Maccers. They don't care about Free as in Speech as a Linux guru does. They don't care about power as much as we do. What they care about is usability, friendliness, beauty and style.
/etc textfiles.
:-)
These are often small points, that even a Miguel de Icaza should not see (I imagine), just because he is used to Unix, to "RTFM!" and
For instance: when you type in a console, and the program is actually busy and not accepting input, your input will still be repeated on screen. (This is extremely nice when your shell loads in "su" and you already start ticking your password.)
Also, we are often distracted by the Windows version of usability. Even GNOME, a project that does a lot of things good in my eyes, pops up messages with "Are you sure you want to...?" now and then.
This is not BAD, but it is one of these small things. I remember my first Windows experience, after having used an Amiga for a time. "Are you sure you want to logout?" No, I'm not, but I still do it.
"No."
Damn! Still running! How can I logout, like, "maybe"?
Sun does this a lot of better: they ask "Please confirm your exit from the desktop session." I click "OK" and I am gone.
Another small thing: when a Mac hits a serious error (which happens only in emulators, I guess), it *apologizes* in the error message, like:
"Sorry, but an error has occored." followed by more information.
Well, see a person who is used to all these nice things get through a Debian install. Or even a graphical install -- for "graphical" doesn't directly mean easy, intuitive and user-friendly. And even though currently user-friendliness focusses on installation, there's a big lack of maintenance-tools user-friendliness. (e.g. try to add a remote Samba printer in Debian.) IMHO a program as Linuxconf only adds to the confusion. It begat buggy beyond repair here, anyway. What's the use of that?
No, I have seen Mac's and I love them, because you really get the feeling that it is a work of true love to the user, when you sit behind it. But I'd rather not depend on a single company for "love", and that keeps me to Linux
But if the folks at GNOME really want to make a super-product, they should not only spy on Microsoft and try to improve that. They should also actively spy at Apple. For they have some very unique approaches to software design. (Not that I don't trust the GNOME folks; they have made some very good decisions IMHO!)
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