On the other hand, Konqueoror has adopted the webkit engine, and I believe Epiphany can be compiled to use webkit as a backend, and then there's also Arora, another cross platform browser using the webkit engine. So the webkit engine, at least, is getting used back in the linux world.
I've met him, he was a proffessor at my university when I was an undergrad, he used to help the math club practice for taking the Putnam exam. He's actually a fairly nice guy when you meet him in person.
Adding the parent, Firefox has something like 21% market-share in the browsing world, at least according to Wikipedia, security through obscurity might be a factor when you've got *really* low market-share, but once you get above the 10% level, if Firefox really *were* less secure, you would see more exploits directed at it.
By the GP's logic, you might as well stick to using Windows 95, since most of the security flaws that exist have already been well documented, while people continue to discover new security flaws in Vista.
Opera's a nice browser, but the web is written to be viewed by IE, Firefox, and Safari, and you can't count on being able to properly view web-pages with Opera.
There's actually a big problem with this, in that any of the fs-es that you're thinking of (ext*,xfs,jfs,reseir) are probably released under the gpl, which makes them incompatible with any license that MS is likely to use on their kernel, so you won't be able to get fs support in the Windows Kernel, I don't know what the situation with file systems in Windows user-space is, but this is a potential serious obstacle to making any flash device work with Windows, the alternative is to use a BSD licensed FS, like UFS or UFS2, but this is a whole different issue, since there are compatability issue with UFS across different unixes, and FreeBSD (maybe some other BSD) are the only OSes, to reliably implement read/write for UFS2. And you'd pretty much have to convince MS to implement the support, or maintain your own third party userspace file system drivers, which will probably suck in one way or another.
Really, MS could save everyone a lot of trouble by freely licensing fat16/32.
Yeah, it's not really a new kind of vulnerability, or a particularly dangerous one, but it sure's something that ought to get fixed. Hopefully without having to rewrite too much Gnome/Kde code.
also
The article doesn't mention it, but I take it Xfce would be vulnerable to this exploit as well? On the other hand, most non-DE window managers should be immune.
It's true that install time is not really a great benchmark, espicially since the only thing you care about is if the system works good post-install, and that's hard to quantify.
I do, however, boot up and shutdown my computer everyday. I also logout when I'm not using my computer at school, it takes at least 30 seconds for a windows XP machine to be useable post-login, and 5 seconds for an identical model computer using PClinux OS to be use-able. And if you back up your data to a usb drive regularly, you care about read/write times of large collections of files.
This is EXACTLY the point I think people miss when they call for standardization of FOSS... I would rather see some basic cross distro, in fact cross-platform, standardization instead like:
-A journalled file system that can hold permissions/uid/gid information that every unix-like operating sytem can read/write compatibly to. (I'd vote for UFS2, a BSD license is pretty much pre-requisite), fat32 just doesn't cut it. I don't care if you can boot from it, all I care is that you can mount, possibly after a kernal compile, and then reliably read/write from both OSes to the file system. (So that I can dualboot linux/bsd/solaris/? without having to worry about user data being out of sink with the other OSes)
Also nice would be:
-A standardized directory heirarchy.
-Utilities named the same thing behave the same way (why do gnu ls and bsd ls take different options?)
-A universal (linux) package format, this I realize is asking maybe for too much, becuase apt developers and rpm developers having both invested too heavily in developing their own packaging tools and pacman (arch linux / frugalware) is better anyway...
-A pony
I think there's a grain of truth in the parent, though, in that, while you CAN install linux on, say, a linksys WRT54G with a 125 MHz CPU, 4 MB flash and 16 MB SDRAM, but I'm not going to by able to install this by first booting a "generic" kernel, then installing packages. By the way, if you want to do this, check out:
openwrt.
I DID switch to XFCE, and while I think XFCE (and, importantly, not Xubuntu or some loaded up XFCE based distro, but a plain, vanilla XFCE) is THE desktop environment for a low-resource system (your only real alternative are WMs), I think that I'm going back to KDE, now that I've got a quad core phenom w/ an onboard Radeon HD 3300. It's a seriously, beautiful Desktop, but MAN, this thing is a heavy weight.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, Konqueoror has adopted the webkit engine, and I believe Epiphany can be compiled to use webkit as a backend, and then there's also Arora, another cross platform browser using the webkit engine. So the webkit engine, at least, is getting used back in the linux world.
Are you sure? What we *really* need some good solid benchmarks comparing links, links II, lynx, and elinks.
I've met him, he was a proffessor at my university when I was an undergrad, he used to help the math club practice for taking the Putnam exam. He's actually a fairly nice guy when you meet him in person.
Adding the parent, Firefox has something like 21% market-share in the browsing world, at least according to Wikipedia, security through obscurity might be a factor when you've got *really* low market-share, but once you get above the 10% level, if Firefox really *were* less secure, you would see more exploits directed at it. By the GP's logic, you might as well stick to using Windows 95, since most of the security flaws that exist have already been well documented, while people continue to discover new security flaws in Vista.
Opera's a nice browser, but the web is written to be viewed by IE, Firefox, and Safari, and you can't count on being able to properly view web-pages with Opera.
I'd like to see a slightly dorky personal web-page for Linus Torvalds. But that's probably just me.
I thought that was what slashdot was for?
Great, now their servers are going to go down becuase everyone's scanning their ports.
Well ... just buy two dual core mac-minis for $599 each, stack them on top of each other and, viola! there you have you're quad-core machine.
Maybe they were ... actually, that looks like most of the faculty web-pages at my university.
There's actually a big problem with this, in that any of the fs-es that you're thinking of (ext*,xfs,jfs,reseir) are probably released under the gpl, which makes them incompatible with any license that MS is likely to use on their kernel, so you won't be able to get fs support in the Windows Kernel, I don't know what the situation with file systems in Windows user-space is, but this is a potential serious obstacle to making any flash device work with Windows, the alternative is to use a BSD licensed FS, like UFS or UFS2, but this is a whole different issue, since there are compatability issue with UFS across different unixes, and FreeBSD (maybe some other BSD) are the only OSes, to reliably implement read/write for UFS2. And you'd pretty much have to convince MS to implement the support, or maintain your own third party userspace file system drivers, which will probably suck in one way or another.
Really, MS could save everyone a lot of trouble by freely licensing fat16/32.
Yeah, it's not really a new kind of vulnerability, or a particularly dangerous one, but it sure's something that ought to get fixed. Hopefully without having to rewrite too much Gnome/Kde code.
also
The article doesn't mention it, but I take it Xfce would be vulnerable to this exploit as well? On the other hand, most non-DE window managers should be immune.
It's true that install time is not really a great benchmark, espicially since the only thing you care about is if the system works good post-install, and that's hard to quantify. I do, however, boot up and shutdown my computer everyday. I also logout when I'm not using my computer at school, it takes at least 30 seconds for a windows XP machine to be useable post-login, and 5 seconds for an identical model computer using PClinux OS to be use-able. And if you back up your data to a usb drive regularly, you care about read/write times of large collections of files.
I screwed up the link try this
Techincally, that would be winning on the merit ... of not being windows.
Windows is pretty good at offering INCOMPATIBILITY with anything else ... fixed it for you.
This is EXACTLY the point I think people miss when they call for standardization of FOSS ... I would rather see some basic cross distro, in fact cross-platform, standardization instead like:
-A journalled file system that can hold permissions/uid/gid information that every unix-like operating sytem can read/write compatibly to. (I'd vote for UFS2, a BSD license is pretty much pre-requisite), fat32 just doesn't cut it. I don't care if you can boot from it, all I care is that you can mount, possibly after a kernal compile, and then reliably read/write from both OSes to the file system. (So that I can dualboot linux/bsd/solaris/? without having to worry about user data being out of sink with the other OSes)
Also nice would be:
-A standardized directory heirarchy.
-Utilities named the same thing behave the same way (why do gnu ls and bsd ls take different options?)
-A universal (linux) package format, this I realize is asking maybe for too much, becuase apt developers and rpm developers having both invested too heavily in developing their own packaging tools and pacman (arch linux / frugalware) is better anyway...
-A pony
I think there's a grain of truth in the parent, though, in that, while you CAN install linux on, say, a linksys WRT54G with a 125 MHz CPU, 4 MB flash and 16 MB SDRAM, but I'm not going to by able to install this by first booting a "generic" kernel, then installing packages. By the way, if you want to do this, check out: openwrt.
Should be: here
Here's the full interview minus the editorial: read it at distrowatch
The way I see it, the BSD and GPL and Proprietary licenses are best understood be an analogy to the prisoners dilemma:
-BSD is always cooperate
-GPL is an eye for an eye
-Proprietary is always defect
Q: Would it be a crime for KDE to steal some of the better innovations from OS X and Windows 7?
A: Only if they're patented
I DID switch to XFCE, and while I think XFCE (and, importantly, not Xubuntu or some loaded up XFCE based distro, but a plain, vanilla XFCE) is THE desktop environment for a low-resource system (your only real alternative are WMs), I think that I'm going back to KDE, now that I've got a quad core phenom w/ an onboard Radeon HD 3300. It's a seriously, beautiful Desktop, but MAN, this thing is a heavy weight.
Hey, now that KDE has been ported to Windows, you just have to wait for KDE to look like you like!
And because most people are testing it on hardware "suitable" to run vista, not stuff you bought becuase it had the minimum specs to run XP.