That's, right - everyone's favourite protocol SMB, which has a flat namespace. Fuck M$ for causing this mess I say. Un-imaginative wankers causing problems well into the future.
rc3 was released with a bug. rc4 was released with the bug fixed rc3 was marked final anyway.
More than that, it's a show-stopper bug on non-Intel architectures. That's sort-of bad and stuff - there's no reason to leave something with a known bug as the most recent release any longer than necessary.. there's an infinite number of version numbers available, it's not like anything would be wasted (and anyone downloading the patch would only have to get a couple of Kb).
Honestly, what they _should_ have done is put out 2.4.19, with nothing but that _one_ patch, marked 2.4.18 DONTUSE, and started with 2.4.20-pre1. Who cares about an extra number?
And domain.com.au is a real-estate listing company. Strange.
Re:Once again, Slashdotters want to have it both w
on
Read the Fine Print
·
· Score: 2
It really happens... You cannot turn off auto updates in XP
Sure you can - you just need to perform some registry surgery. Anybody know the keys in question?
More to the point, you probably want to find the executable and replace it with the moral equivalent of/bin/true. That way the system will happily think it's running it. Maybe/bin/sleep 500 would be a better option (if it wants the program to run for a bit).
The comparison between this problem and how easy it is to get a users email address list with Outlook is simply laughable.
Sure, though grepping through ~/mbox,/var/mail/$USER and similar spots will also find addresses, as will looking through things like Kmail and friends private mail storage. Shit, if you really wanted to you could write something that greps for email addresses through every file in ~/. Sure it's not quite so easy, but it's not rocket science either.
The signing part is actually quite good. A virus author would have to get a valid, certified key from an Certification Aurthority (like Verisign) and sign the Virus with this key... well, this obviously would be stupid, except if he is planing to find out about live in prison pretty fast.
ITYM would have to break into the machine of _anyone_ who happens to have an already valid signing key (gosh - wonder how many people with one of them keep it on an unsecured Windows box on a broadband link. Only needs to be one).
After that it's a matter of distributing the virus before the owner of the key realises it's been 'borrowed'. That is soooooo unlikely, sure.
I sit here as a smug old Unix hacker, secure in the knowledge that lisp and Smalltalk programs are unlikely to be attacked in the same way that C programs are.
No, of course not. They'll be attacked in new and interesting ways.
I'm also sure I'm wrong.
Aren't we all. Nice to see someone admit it though;)
after all what are the chances your going to survive the asteroid impacts, catastrophic earthquakes, global warming, ozone depletion and the global flooding after the melting of the polar ice caps?
Exactly - a link is as strong as a single chain - and humans will only exist on earth while _all_ the required conditions for human existance remain. While this is cool science, it isn't very relevant for our survival as a species until we deal with some of our other niggling problems.
The easiest way to secure these systems is to ensure that there is a closed VPN which is tied to two devices, one on the sat, one on the ground. Redundant nodes come into play but its again only the physical that matters.
Sure Redundant nodes are essential. How stupid would you feel (and how quickly would you be fired) if a box on the ground died for whatever reason (hardware failure, fire, someone tossed the wrong box) and you couldn't control the bird any more.
So - as a social engineering sort of hacker, probably the easier goal is to go for one of these backup devices - expecially since it's less likely they'll notice it's gone (hard to hide the fact that the primary box is off-line!)
Of course a sensible shop will have secured the backups in a vault somewhere - and I don't even need to mention proper authentication procedures for _removing_ this thing from the vault - so I can't turn up with a stolen uniform pinched at the cleaners and lift int.
Does it really matter? PDF is a copyrighted format (i.e., Adobe owns it)
I think you have just made the original poster's point.
PDF is a copyrighted format, as is DOC - because of this, they are not the best formats to be discussing open systems in - they are copyright and not open.
so Linux should be called GNU/GNU/Xfree86 Linux. I think we'd end up with a lot of GNU's in the names of the software we use:]
Isn't that the point of GNU's NOT UNIX? You can fold up as many mentions in front as you like, because it's a recursive acronym, and it still means the same infinite amount no matter how many of them you stick in front.
You don't seem to understand this concept of "industry standard". It means that when your monkey ass is gone, the next guy can step in and hit the ground running. While your custom perl script setup may be r33t, there is only one person on the planet who understands exactly how/where/why they were set up and that is you. No manager in their right mind would want their tech guy to have them by the balls like that.
Exactly - and I don't see that Cicso kit is any more 'Industry Standard' than Perl - or for that matter that Windows is any more 'Industry Standard' than Linux. He new linux (from the 'gee isn't e kRaD d00d' direction), but didn't know any Perl, so rather than learning Perl (seriously, the code was well commented, adequately documented for someone who put some time into learning perl (like how.pm files work and what _standard_ modules like DBI do).
It also helped to understand the ipchains syntax so you could understand what was being parsed. Dammit, even the giant regexp that read the ipchains file was documented with an example line, and then had the/x flag with each element on a separate line with a comment. I guess that was too much work for "I've nearly got a Cisco Cert so I'll claim I have" boy.
I really don't like "I've got a couple of certs" as a substitute for "I know how to read code and understand things that are already in place".
You know, I agree with a lot of the sentiment of your post, but
Its like this, spudboy.."industry experience" means sleeping on the floor of your office overnight because you need to babysit half a dozen mission-critical AIX, Solaris and IRIX boxes following a complete power-failure and network outage, because if you dont, the entire department's workload might grind to a halt, and the company will lose $30,000 per minute until its fixed.
When I was 20 (all of 4 years ago) and managing a network for 200 users, 50 client machines - I spent many a long night recovering from various failures due to a very small budget and the fact that everything (except the Cisco switches - they were sweet, and never caused any problems apart from a lightning strike killing one (doh!)) Having now done the same thing in more 'industry' setting (that was a college network), I can say that it's very similar.
On the other hand, the person who replaced me in that college position sounded similar (in his brag-sheet) to mr '5 years experience' above.. The line that really got me was 'a few certifications'. Mr PFY-type had done the coursework for a CCNA (not actually done the tests or been certified) - and wrote a long document talking about how my very reliable Perl based user tracking and billing system was not 'industry standard', and should be replaced by a pile of expensive Cisco stuff because that was 'Industry Standard[tm]'. He also had a MSCE and wanted to install Exchange, etc (we didn't even provide email services, because the Uni provided all that and less work for us meant less cost - plus mail services have a heavy support load). Oh, did I mention he included _every_ certification, including that CCNA he didn't have, in his 'title' at the top of the document. It read like a 'these are my ideas, which are mine. Me - this one with all the letters. ME!'.
I think the biggest problem I see with youngsters (including myself at the ripe old age of 24) is that we tend to want to try everything - and change all the time just for the sake of playing with new things.
At least (I hope), I don't do to much 'THIS IS ME WITH ALL THESE LETTERS AND YEARZ OF EXP!RIeNC3 d00d!@!!!!!!1111!!!'.
If you're using xfs-xtt, then you aren't using XRENDER, which provides font anti-aliasing. Are you even running XFree 4.x?
Yes, and I was following a KDE Anti-Aliased Fonts that I found online somewhere.
I'll have to say that XFree's documentation (at least as installed with Debian leaves a _lot_ to be desired. While trying to work out how to use my wheel-mouse's scrolling features, I was continually told use 'xxxPS' drivers, but nowhere (and this is with a zgrep of all the files in the docs directory) was there any list of these drivers. Certainly nothing in the man page lists all the options.
Not so friendly if even a slightly experienced person can't find the documentation on an option - and XFree is not happy about a wrong-named option in the XF86Config-4 file - it just dies, doesn't print a list of possible options on STDERR or anything helpful.
Guess I'd better go look for the (probably also not well documented XRENDER thingy then, and see if it helps my KDE at all).
Yep - google isn't turning up any handy hits. zgrep -i xrender in/usr/doc/xserver-xfree86/ turned up no hits, in/usr/doc/xfree86-common/ hit on changelog entries only, not docs.
Gosh, no mention in the XF86Config man page on xfree86.org. That makes me happy, oh yes. Helpful we are, oh Xfree86 community. Ahh, the xfree86.org site has no search function.
*sigh* - by this time 90% of people have gone back to Windows...
Without file and magic, extensions are the easiest solution. Not the best, but the easiest. A HPFS type filesystem with extended attributes containing the MIME type would be wonderful. But I don't see that happening on any free Unix soon.
Yeah - it's always hard to hack in a decent meta-data system later, very sad. It's a real pity that Microsoft's.ext format seems to be winning, since it's one of the stupider ways of keeping meta-data. I also really like the ability to store both the _format_ of a file and the _creator_ of that file, so that just because a file is a.bmp doesn't mean it automatically opens in Microsoft Paint, or in Omnipage. Sometimes you want to tag that it's an intermediate file containing text to be parsed, and sometimes it's a picture with lots of pink tones that you want hidden from other users of the.... damn, I think I'm rambling again.
If that's all you need, go for it. Many days that's all I need. But sometimes I want more. To assume that what you want is what everyone else needs is the height of hubris.
Indeed - which is why I didn't ever say, or assume, that that's all that everyone needs. What I was saying is that compared to a KDE (complete managed desktop thingy) session, a Windowmaker sessions is lightweight, and doesn't get in my way.
I can see that Blackbox has serious support too, and will certainly be evaluating it once I get my system back into multi-OS mode (would you believe I managed to wipe all my Windows partitions by having the wrong hard-disk plugged in when I format c:;format d:'d it. F$#&*(ing grr. Anyway, it's all coming back together now - not that anyone cares (or should) - my stupid mistake. Doh!
File associations are difficult because it relys on.ext Windows style stuff - I think it's a lot better using Mac style RSRC forks, but that's just too difficult to cruft in - maybe Amiga style $filename.info (or more like.$filename.info would work - something that doesn't mean reading the start of every single file in the directory). I don't create text files with a.txt extention on Linux, and I don't intend to start. Sure using file(1) and magic helps, but it's expensive on scanning a directory.
My window manager nirvana has come in the form of Blackbox
I quite enjoyed it the couple of times I've played with it (when my laptop's hard disk was failing, and the KDE install was corrupted, but I couldn't be bothered cleaning it out - blackbox was the only other window manager that still worked;)
I'll have a play with it on the new SCSI 10,000rpm drive that's arriving later today - oh what fun.
Regarding the fonts, my fonts look lovely with KDE once I switched to using the antialiased ones - Qt and KDE can use the new XRENDER/Xft font subsystem of XFree86 these days.
Once I got the xfs-xtt server working in Debian and talking to the X server ( not the most fun thing in itself ), I discovered that Konsole is absolutely horrific under antialiasing - font corruption leaves little bits of pixel-dust all over the screen, it's nearly unreadable, very jerky. Unfortunately, without switching back to rxvt for all terminal stuff, there's no easy way to avoid this that I can see.
Yes, the antialised fonts look pretty, apart from the previously mentioned font-size and widget size problems that lead to things looking wrong (fonts running over the edges of their widgets and looking really messy). I guess this is either slack programming (it's a 12 point font, so give it n pixels rather than measuring the size of the text in the current font), or the font-rendering layer is reporting the wrong values for antialised text.
Anyway, I'm sure I could be using KDE more sensibly - and indeed I could have chosen the 'look more like Windowmaker' choice - but if I wanted that, why not just use Windowmaker in the first place? KDE apps will still start their DCOP server and chat to each other just fine, and I have all the nice bits of Windowmaker like wmbiff (see my previous post about how useful that was).
has a maximum bandwidth of 1Mbps, which can be degraded by the presence of other bluetooth devices or 802.11 signals.
May not be a big deal, but I remember when people were raving about USB devices because it gave them 12Mbps, decreasing their response time in games like Unreal and such.
I probably wouldn't be playing Unreal with it - but that is a good point actually - I guess in a cubical farm, anything networkish is going to want to play nice with a lot of other machines. For home use though, there wouldn't be _that_ many other devices competing.
Ok, so bluetooth on the desktop maybe isn't such a good idea, but I'd still like to see bluetooth integrated with the motherboard, so that I didn't have to plug in a USB dongle/cable to talk to every little handheld device.
You would still have cables, unless all of your devices were battery powered. That is the one thing people keep forgetting when they talk about Bluetooth and PCs. FireWire and USB both carry power, allowing you to connect most devices with only one cable -- which you'd be doing anyway even with Bluetooth.
Sure - an example from right here in front of me is the Logitech Cordless Wheel Mouse[tm]. I am so in love with this thing (or something). It's responsive, reliable, chews through a couple of AAA's every year or so with my use (which is quite a lot) - I think last time I replaced them because it was being jerky, it was actually Windows bitrot, and changing the batteries didn't fix things - but I thought at the rate it eats them, no worries.
What I'd like is for something in the PC to talk directly to the mouse, rather than having a PS/2 dongle hanging off to talk to it.
Yes, there are issues with synchronising in a busy room - I'm sure they can be handled. Again, I think the logitech 'hold down this button on both devices' theory is good - make it a button on the front of the PC, and chances are very good that two people, even in a crowded office, won't try it at the same time. If they do, it could even detect that and emit a beep or similar, then use good old 'backoff for a couple of minutes or so and try again'.
If I had keyboard and mouse chatting bluetooth, it would be a great start. Sure I can get the Logitech equipment that does that, but I have to have the connector box, and I can't move it from one machine to another. Add in a palm-type device that chats directly with the same protocol (no more lining up IR ports), and all would be wonderful.
Don't mind my pipe-dreams, I see that ASIO are listening already, without needing radio equipment on my desk making their job easier. After all, I'm a subversive Linux user/probably hacker or virus writer.
internet gaming (via a USB adapter to a net-connected PC)
And here we see the problem that I think Bluetooth is still facing - there just isn't enough market penetration on PCs. What I would really like to see is something bluetooth-style on the desktop (rather than USB) so that I didn't have to mess with all those cables all the time.
For 'network games' you could run a server on the PC (or a multiplexer for internet games), then just sit around on couches playing, rather than all huddling up withing controller-cable distance, or getting off your lazy arse to go untagle medusa-the-controller-herd.
Ahh for time to play games (flash is responsible for all sorts of evils on the web, and time-wasting games numbers among them I say. I've just taken out a few minutes from flash-games on the web to write a slashdot comment, while my girlfriend takes off ahead on the laptop - I think she's about 3 levels ahead of me now dammit. Must stop slashdotting......)
Careful.
I was once flamed to high hell for even using KDE and windows in the same sentence
Don't worry, I have thick skin, and the whole point of KDE (that I can see) is to create an environment that people who like Windows will be happy in - an integrated environment where everything works with everything else, and looks the same (while themeable of course).
I think that's a great goal, and I know lots of people who enjoy using it already, and will enjoy it even more when there is more consistent support. Heck, I'll probably have a KDE boot on my machine for when I want that sort of thing, but WM or similar (blackbox looks nice too) are the way to go for seriously productive VI work.
Oh shit, now the Emacs crowd will be flaming me too. Oops.
Slashdot Mirror
[nnn.ps.min.mn.us[.domain.tld.]
A couple of words for you.
Windows Flat Namespace.
That's, right - everyone's favourite protocol SMB, which has a flat namespace. Fuck M$ for
causing this mess I say. Un-imaginative wankers
causing problems well into the future.
Repeat after me: When I used to be an instrumentation tech, we resold batteries all of the time
Shirly you mean resoldered batteries all of the time?
rc3 was released with a bug.
rc4 was released with the bug fixed
rc3 was marked final anyway.
More than that, it's a show-stopper bug on non-Intel architectures. That's sort-of bad and stuff - there's no reason to leave something with a known bug as the most recent release any longer than necessary.. there's an infinite number of version numbers available, it's not like anything would be wasted (and anyone downloading the patch would only have to get a couple of Kb).
Honestly, what they _should_ have done is put out 2.4.19, with nothing but that _one_ patch, marked 2.4.18 DONTUSE, and started with 2.4.20-pre1. Who cares about an extra number?
[domain.com] is in fact a valid domain
And domain.com.au is a real-estate listing company. Strange.
It really happens... You cannot turn off auto updates in XP
/bin/true. That way the system will happily think it's running it. Maybe /bin/sleep 500 would be a better option (if it wants the program to run for a bit).
Sure you can - you just need to perform some registry surgery. Anybody know the keys in question?
More to the point, you probably want to find the executable and replace it with the moral equivalent of
The comparison between this problem and how easy it is to get a users email address list with Outlook is simply laughable.
/var/mail/$USER and similar spots will also find addresses, as will looking through things like Kmail and friends private mail storage. Shit, if you really wanted to you could write something that greps for email addresses through every file in ~/. Sure it's not quite so easy, but it's not rocket science either.
Sure, though grepping through ~/mbox,
2) Microsoft has made it easy to do some incredibly stupid things. For example, getting the contents of your address book is dead simple.
/etc/aliases ~/.aliases /home/*/.aliases | perl virusmailer.pl
So what:
cat
(the last just incase anyone else on the system has left their aliases file world readable).
Will get quite a lot of programs. Of course you could make it more intelligent easily enough to account for most of the common programs.
The signing part is actually quite good. A virus author would have to get a valid, certified key from an Certification Aurthority (like Verisign) and sign the Virus with this key ... well, this obviously would be stupid, except if he is planing to find out about live in prison pretty fast.
ITYM would have to break into the machine of _anyone_ who happens to have an already valid signing key (gosh - wonder how many people with one of them keep it on an unsecured Windows box on a broadband link. Only needs to be one).
After that it's a matter of distributing the virus before the owner of the key realises it's been 'borrowed'. That is soooooo unlikely, sure.
I sit here as a smug old Unix hacker, secure in the knowledge that lisp and Smalltalk programs are unlikely to be attacked in the same way that C programs are.
;)
No, of course not. They'll be attacked in new and interesting ways.
I'm also sure I'm wrong.
Aren't we all. Nice to see someone admit it though
after all what are the chances your going to survive the asteroid impacts, catastrophic earthquakes, global warming, ozone depletion and the global flooding after the melting of the polar ice caps?
...
Exactly - a link is as strong as a single chain - and humans will only exist on earth while _all_ the required conditions for human existance remain. While this is cool science, it isn't very relevant for our survival as a species until we deal with some of our other niggling problems.
... like poisoning people for fun and profit
The easiest way to secure these systems is to ensure that there is a closed VPN which is tied to two devices, one on the sat, one on the ground. Redundant nodes come into play but its again only the physical that matters.
Sure Redundant nodes are essential. How stupid would you feel (and how quickly would you be fired) if a box on the ground died for whatever reason (hardware failure, fire, someone tossed the wrong box) and you couldn't control the bird any more.
So - as a social engineering sort of hacker, probably the easier goal is to go for one of these backup devices - expecially since it's less likely they'll notice it's gone (hard to hide the fact that the primary box is off-line!)
Of course a sensible shop will have secured the backups in a vault somewhere - and I don't even need to mention proper authentication procedures for _removing_ this thing from the vault - so I can't turn up with a stolen uniform pinched at the cleaners and lift int.
Does it really matter? PDF is a copyrighted format (i.e., Adobe owns it)
I think you have just made the original poster's point.
PDF is a copyrighted format, as is DOC - because of this, they are not the best formats to be discussing open systems in - they are copyright and not open.
QED.
so Linux should be called GNU/GNU/Xfree86 Linux. I think we'd end up with a lot of GNU's in the names of the software we use :]
Isn't that the point of GNU's NOT UNIX? You can fold up as many mentions in front as you like, because it's a recursive acronym, and it still means the same infinite amount no matter how many of them you stick in front.
You don't seem to understand this concept of "industry standard". It means that when your monkey ass is gone, the next guy can step in and hit the ground running. While your custom perl script setup may be r33t, there is only one person on the planet who understands exactly how/where/why they were set up and that is you. No manager in their right mind would want their tech guy to have them by the balls like that.
.pm files work and what _standard_ modules like DBI do).
/x flag with each element on a separate line with a comment. I guess that was too much work for "I've nearly got a Cisco Cert so I'll claim I have" boy.
Exactly - and I don't see that Cicso kit is any more 'Industry Standard' than Perl - or for that matter that Windows is any more 'Industry Standard' than Linux. He new linux (from the 'gee isn't e kRaD d00d' direction), but didn't know any Perl, so rather than learning Perl (seriously, the code was well commented, adequately documented for someone who put some time into learning perl (like how
It also helped to understand the ipchains syntax so you could understand what was being parsed. Dammit, even the giant regexp that read the ipchains file was documented with an example line, and then had the
I really don't like "I've got a couple of certs" as a substitute for "I know how to read code and understand things that are already in place".
You know, I agree with a lot of the sentiment of your post, but
Its like this, spudboy.."industry experience" means sleeping on the floor of your office overnight because you need to babysit half a dozen mission-critical AIX, Solaris and IRIX boxes following a complete power-failure and network outage, because if you dont, the entire department's workload might grind to a halt, and the company will lose $30,000 per minute until its fixed.
When I was 20 (all of 4 years ago) and managing a network for 200 users, 50 client machines - I spent many a long night recovering from various failures due to a very small budget and the fact that everything (except the Cisco switches - they were sweet, and never caused any problems apart from a lightning strike killing one (doh!)) Having now done the same thing in more 'industry' setting (that was a college network), I can say that it's very similar.
On the other hand, the person who replaced me in that college position sounded similar (in his brag-sheet) to mr '5 years experience' above.. The line that really got me was 'a few certifications'. Mr PFY-type had done the coursework for a CCNA (not actually done the tests or been certified) - and wrote a long document talking about how my very reliable Perl based user tracking and billing system was not 'industry standard', and should be replaced by a pile of expensive Cisco stuff because that was 'Industry Standard[tm]'. He also had a MSCE and wanted to install Exchange, etc (we didn't even provide email services, because the Uni provided all that and less work for us meant less cost - plus mail services have a heavy support load). Oh, did I mention he included _every_ certification, including that CCNA he didn't have, in his 'title' at the top of the document. It read like a 'these are my ideas, which are mine. Me - this one with all the letters. ME!'.
I think the biggest problem I see with youngsters (including myself at the ripe old age of 24) is that we tend to want to try everything - and change all the time just for the sake of playing with new things.
At least (I hope), I don't do to much 'THIS IS ME WITH ALL THESE LETTERS AND YEARZ OF EXP!RIeNC3 d00d!@!!!!!!1111!!!'.
If you're using xfs-xtt, then you aren't using XRENDER, which provides font anti-aliasing. Are you even running XFree 4.x?
/usr/doc/xserver-xfree86/ turned up no hits, in /usr/doc/xfree86-common/ hit on changelog entries only, not docs.
Yes, and I was following a KDE Anti-Aliased Fonts that I found online somewhere.
I'll have to say that XFree's documentation (at least as installed with Debian leaves a _lot_ to be desired. While trying to work out how to use my wheel-mouse's scrolling features, I was continually told use 'xxxPS' drivers, but nowhere (and this is with a zgrep of all the files in the docs directory) was there any list of these drivers. Certainly nothing in the man page lists all the options.
Not so friendly if even a slightly experienced person can't find the documentation on an option - and XFree is not happy about a wrong-named option in the XF86Config-4 file - it just dies, doesn't print a list of possible options on STDERR or anything helpful.
Guess I'd better go look for the (probably also not well documented XRENDER thingy then, and see if it helps my KDE at all).
Yep - google isn't turning up any handy hits. zgrep -i xrender in
Gosh, no mention in the XF86Config man page on xfree86.org. That makes me happy, oh yes. Helpful we are, oh Xfree86 community. Ahh, the xfree86.org site has no search function.
*sigh* - by this time 90% of people have gone back to Windows...
Without file and magic, extensions are the easiest solution. Not the best, but the easiest. A HPFS type filesystem with extended attributes containing the MIME type would be wonderful. But I don't see that happening on any free Unix soon.
.ext format seems to be winning, since it's one of the stupider ways of keeping meta-data. I also really like the ability to store both the _format_ of a file and the _creator_ of that file, so that just because a file is a .bmp doesn't mean it automatically opens in Microsoft Paint, or in Omnipage. Sometimes you want to tag that it's an intermediate file containing text to be parsed, and sometimes it's a picture with lots of pink tones that you want hidden from other users of the.... damn, I think I'm rambling again.
Yeah - it's always hard to hack in a decent meta-data system later, very sad. It's a real pity that Microsoft's
If that's all you need, go for it. Many days that's all I need. But sometimes I want more. To assume that what you want is what everyone else needs is the height of hubris.
.ext Windows style stuff - I think it's a lot better using Mac style RSRC forks, but that's just too difficult to cruft in - maybe Amiga style $filename.info (or more like .$filename.info would work - something that doesn't mean reading the start of every single file in the directory). I don't create text files with a .txt extention on Linux, and I don't intend to start. Sure using file(1) and magic helps, but it's expensive on scanning a directory.
Indeed - which is why I didn't ever say, or assume, that that's all that everyone needs. What I was saying is that compared to a KDE (complete managed desktop thingy) session, a Windowmaker sessions is lightweight, and doesn't get in my way.
I can see that Blackbox has serious support too, and will certainly be evaluating it once I get my system back into multi-OS mode (would you believe I managed to wipe all my Windows partitions by having the wrong hard-disk plugged in when I format c:;format d:'d it. F$#&*(ing grr. Anyway, it's all coming back together now - not that anyone cares (or should) - my stupid mistake. Doh!
File associations are difficult because it relys on
My window manager nirvana has come in the form of Blackbox
;)
I quite enjoyed it the couple of times I've played with it (when my laptop's hard disk was failing, and the KDE install was corrupted, but I couldn't be bothered cleaning it out - blackbox was the only other window manager that still worked
I'll have a play with it on the new SCSI 10,000rpm drive that's arriving later today - oh what fun.
Regarding the fonts, my fonts look lovely with KDE once I switched to using the antialiased ones - Qt and KDE can use the new XRENDER/Xft font subsystem of XFree86 these days.
Once I got the xfs-xtt server working in Debian and talking to the X server ( not the most fun thing in itself ), I discovered that Konsole is absolutely horrific under antialiasing - font corruption leaves little bits of pixel-dust all over the screen, it's nearly unreadable, very jerky. Unfortunately, without switching back to rxvt for all terminal stuff, there's no easy way to avoid this that I can see.
Yes, the antialised fonts look pretty, apart from the previously mentioned font-size and widget size problems that lead to things looking wrong (fonts running over the edges of their widgets and looking really messy). I guess this is either slack programming (it's a 12 point font, so give it n pixels rather than measuring the size of the text in the current font), or the font-rendering layer is reporting the wrong values for antialised text.
Anyway, I'm sure I could be using KDE more sensibly - and indeed I could have chosen the 'look more like Windowmaker' choice - but if I wanted that, why not just use Windowmaker in the first place? KDE apps will still start their DCOP server and chat to each other just fine, and I have all the nice bits of Windowmaker like wmbiff (see my previous post about how useful that was).
has a maximum bandwidth of 1Mbps, which can be degraded by the presence of other bluetooth devices or 802.11 signals.
May not be a big deal, but I remember when people were raving about USB devices because it gave them 12Mbps, decreasing their response time in games like Unreal and such.
I probably wouldn't be playing Unreal with it - but that is a good point actually - I guess in a cubical farm, anything networkish is going to want to play nice with a lot of other machines. For home use though, there wouldn't be _that_ many other devices competing.
Ok, so bluetooth on the desktop maybe isn't such a good idea, but I'd still like to see bluetooth integrated with the motherboard, so that I didn't have to plug in a USB dongle/cable to talk to every little handheld device.
You would still have cables, unless all of your devices were battery powered. That is the one thing people keep forgetting when they talk about Bluetooth and PCs. FireWire and USB both carry power, allowing you to connect most devices with only one cable -- which you'd be doing anyway even with Bluetooth.
Sure - an example from right here in front of me is the Logitech Cordless Wheel Mouse[tm]. I am so in love with this thing (or something). It's responsive, reliable, chews through a couple of AAA's every year or so with my use (which is quite a lot) - I think last time I replaced them because it was being jerky, it was actually Windows bitrot, and changing the batteries didn't fix things - but I thought at the rate it eats them, no worries.
What I'd like is for something in the PC to talk directly to the mouse, rather than having a PS/2 dongle hanging off to talk to it.
Yes, there are issues with synchronising in a busy room - I'm sure they can be handled. Again, I think the logitech 'hold down this button on both devices' theory is good - make it a button on the front of the PC, and chances are very good that two people, even in a crowded office, won't try it at the same time. If they do, it could even detect that and emit a beep or similar, then use good old 'backoff for a couple of minutes or so and try again'.
If I had keyboard and mouse chatting bluetooth, it would be a great start. Sure I can get the Logitech equipment that does that, but I have to have the connector box, and I can't move it from one machine to another. Add in a palm-type device that chats directly with the same protocol (no more lining up IR ports), and all would be wonderful.
Don't mind my pipe-dreams, I see that ASIO are listening already, without needing radio equipment on my desk making their job easier. After all, I'm a subversive Linux user/probably hacker or virus writer.
internet gaming (via a USB adapter to a net-connected PC)
And here we see the problem that I think Bluetooth is still facing - there just isn't enough market penetration on PCs. What I would really like to see is something bluetooth-style on the desktop (rather than USB) so that I didn't have to mess with all those cables all the time.
For 'network games' you could run a server on the PC (or a multiplexer for internet games), then just sit around on couches playing, rather than all huddling up withing controller-cable distance, or getting off your lazy arse to go untagle medusa-the-controller-herd.
Ahh for time to play games (flash is responsible for all sorts of evils on the web, and time-wasting games numbers among them I say. I've just taken out a few minutes from flash-games on the web to write a slashdot comment, while my girlfriend takes off ahead on the laptop - I think she's about 3 levels ahead of me now dammit. Must stop slashdotting......)
Careful.
I was once flamed to high hell for even using KDE and windows in the same sentence
Don't worry, I have thick skin, and the whole point of KDE (that I can see) is to create an environment that people who like Windows will be happy in - an integrated environment where everything works with everything else, and looks the same (while themeable of course).
I think that's a great goal, and I know lots of people who enjoy using it already, and will enjoy it even more when there is more consistent support. Heck, I'll probably have a KDE boot on my machine for when I want that sort of thing, but WM or similar (blackbox looks nice too) are the way to go for seriously productive VI work.
Oh shit, now the Emacs crowd will be flaming me too. Oops.