Well, it's science oriented, but the Grace plotting program uses motif and I find it extremely useful.
Geomview, iirc, is also motif based.
Then there is Nedit, which is still my favorite casual text editor. (Sorry emacs/vi crowds;-) I do use emacs, but only when something heavy duty is required.)
For mainstream desktop programs, you may be right. But believe me there is a LOT more out there than that, and a lot of the more specialty programs would be a LOT of work to convert to another toolkit. More to the point, scientists (for example) often don't even add a good build system, to say nothing of being able to casually switch toolkits.
So yes, there are a fair number of Motif apps - it's just that they aren't as mainstream as Gnome/KDE.
I appreciate and largely agree with your presentation on the state of systems research, but one area where there are perhaps both academic and commercial points of interest is the security/reliability question.
(I should point out I consider these two things to be closely related, since a compromised system cannot be considered a reliable one.)
I agree people have largely decided how they want to use computers, but I don't think anyone can dispute that while computers and software today might provide people with the functionality they want they do not do it in a robust manner. I would think there are a great many interesting problems surrounding figuring out how to impliment a proven, uncrackable software system that provides the functionality people want today.
I had hopes that the EROS system might prove to be the first step in this direction, but research on it has slowed to virtually nothing. But in addition to designing from the ground up in a truly paranoid fashion, they used proof logic to verify key mechanisms of their security structure. I know there are distinct limits to this approach, but I have always wondered if, working within these limits, a system that provides today's expected functionality could be created.
(Note when I say functionality I refer primarily to end user applications like the spreadsheet, database, and word processor. Other types of change in the user environment, so long as they are changed for a reason where benefits are real to the end user, are fine.)
Could you comment on this as a possible future direction for computer research?
There exists a point where economic interests, given a political system which can be bribed, become so powerful that they effectively have total control of the system. As far as the downward spiral of individual liberty at the expense of corporate profit, this is the Point of No Return. Yes, on the books they don't have the power, but practical realities and what the books say are often very different things.
Realistically, the power of the people to speak louder than money is only felt if a) said people are interested in exercising that power at the expense of personal convenience and b) they are willing to think for themselves. This seldom happens, and only when things get Really Bad. I'm not talking about IP laws, I'm talking about not being able to get the basics of life. Abstract economics doesn't get people excited, because its not important enough. Tomorrow's meal or the kid's latest cold is what's important for most people.
As long as powerful economic interests are able to keep most of the people relatively comfortable, they will never have to deal with popular uprising about MP3 downloading or stupid patents. People ignore these things unless it impacts them personally, and it seldom does enough to hurt.
Beyond the Point of No Return, corporate power is able to use the statistics of democracy to run the country. Barring the crumbling of their power due to total economic collapse, they control the media and can use it to influence and placate people as they see fit.
So brace yourself geeks, because we don't have a Voice. We are without economic or political power, and we are so small a minority in the democratic whole we can be ignored no matter how loud we yell. Because most people don't care about what we care about. In a two party system, massive numbers and middle of the road are the order. We are neither.
Which doesn't mean we should just go gentle into that good night, but bear in mind the patent system being profitable to the people abusing it is more politically important than the little (relatively quiet) guy being squashed. If we fight, we need to fight smart and not charge at the problem head on. Because we might as well be a flea going head to head with a rhino.
Koffice, although its import/export filters historically have left something to be desired. Unlike OpenOffice, you just get a "clean" feel when you start it up. Not super bloated, and the default layout doesn't waste lots of screen space with wide margins around the image of the paper (I know that's a stupid nitpick, but it's been driving me nuts about OpenOffice.org)
Now the KDE integration efforts for OO have made it quite a bit nicer to look at under KDE, for which I am grateful. But I still have to say I hope KOffice becomes a front runner for Linux office suites. If everybody uses the OO XML document standard that's in the works they can all compete on an equal footing, and Koffice documents could be read by OO on Windows. Koffice is a nice piece of work, but (partially due to their KDE only status) they have had a hard time getting the critical mass of developers needed to do what they're trying to do. Without the power of KDE+QT they wouldn't be anywhere NEAR where they are now, as far as I can tell.
I wish Apple or someone would decide to use the KOffice setup (yeah that would be a lot of work, but still...) and give KOffice enough full time developers to get all the annoying little features stuffed in. Feature parity with OpenOffice.org is a must, and with MSOffice would be ideal. People are used to those features, and in a game like Office software that's all that matters.
General Security
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Security Alert
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I suspect we will never have universal security in the computer world, as long as it takes any effort on the part of the end user. Which leads to several conclusions:
a) Social Engineering will ALWAYS succeed. Whatever engineers do to protect a computer, they can only protect the user from themselves up to a point. There's no cure for giving someone you think you trust your username and password, for example, and then having them rip of your confidential data. Or for that matter, keeping people from answering emails using information they shouldn't. It's a grim conclusion, but short of warning people not to be trusting nothing can be done.
b) The machine itself CAN be made much more secure by default. This usually comes at the cost of user-friendlyness, but the username/password/account idea seems to be virtually universal now. The key to making a user friendly secure machine for the average consumer is to set up rules that allow the machine to do everything the user is likely to want to do, and ONLY that. In other words, some form of Mandatory Access Control. This is a pain in the neck for those who want to do lots of complex things on their machine, but I suspect the average needs of the modern user are becoming well defined enough to achieve something. And if applications AS PART OF THE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS create rules for what their program needs to be allowed to do (which can be externally audited to keep them honest) we might achieve a situation where it's difficult to impossible for a computer to be cracked from the outside through technological means.
c) The bad news is, there's no market for b) and so it's unlikely it will ever happen. People have to be willing to pay the price for security, and I suspect up front cost of inconvenience (either to developers, end users, or both) will be seen as greater than the statistical potential of dangerous information theft. Whether that's true or not I don't know, certainly it varies on an individual level, but it takes herds of users to fund commercial software development and I suspect the average consumer response will be the immediate path of least inconvenience.
d) Open Source, being outside normal economic constraints, might produce something like b) eventually. But while individual projects might code to such standards, they are probably too high a median to set for casual, unpaid development. Success would require most of the open source community to be willing to do extensive testing and planning for running their software in a MAC environment, and that's not much fun to most non-security oriented developers.
e) So, in the end, matters will only improve when the costs of electronic theft and attack are so high they raise demand for secure systems to the economic minimum. Whether that will ever happen I don't know. My cynical guess is it won't - we'll just have to live with it. (Individual geeks of course can try to do better, but the internet has become a community. For better or worse.)
This is just a guess, but I think every movie garners a certain "integrity" in the technologies which were used to make it. Certain techniques were used to create it, and the movie audiences know based on viewing LOTS of TV and films over the years what fits and what doesn't (perhaps without quite appreciating it). CGI doesn't fit in the original Star Wars, at least not for major visible additions (clean up and touch up is fine).
Of course, a lot of it is nostalgia, too. But what's wrong with that? I still don't get why Lucas doesn't do a "historical release" and make another zillion bucks.
I'm curious as to why they chose the particular tools they did. I don't know too much about these issues, but from what I understand the NSA's selinux patches are a very robust and powerful set of tools. IIRC Redhat has been integrating it into their systems. It may be that this isn't the best choice, but I'd be curious if someone who knows them well could give us a rundown of why some solutions might be better/worse.
One issue with selinux I (think) I understand is that in order for applications to run properly you need to have predefined rules which allow them to do what they need to do (the nature of MAC is they can't do anything except what is explicitly allowed, as I understand it). This is possible for servers, which do only a few jobs repeatedly, but for a desktop machine with hundreds of potential applications to fire up and more being developed such a burden becomes huge. A normal user would end up turning off MAC in order to use the computer the way they want to, unless each application they want or may want to use already has a default ruleset present. I would be really happy to see this happen - various distributions collaborate on default rules for large numbers of applications, so end users could actually use systems that are seriously hardened. I know it's probably overkill, but given what casual Windows users on the network have done over the years (as well as unsecured Linux boxes and other OSes, for that matter) I think if some combination of projects could deliver a usable desktop machine with mandatory access control and any other features which might defend their box while letting it be useful would be a Very Good Thing. One thing is for sure - too little security does more harm to the internet community than having more protection than you need.
Frankly, I doubt many people vote on anything more weighty than who looks the best in front of a camera.
And the current system encourages that. Did you ever stop to wonder why there seems to be so little discussion of issues? It's because that's not how you win.
People who actually take the time to think about issues will have an opinion, and probably a strong one. Hence, a political party taking the opposite stance from the one the person decides on won't get their vote. Then there's the problem that most people WON'T think about it, and tune you out as annoying. Thinking is uncomfortable. And no ears/eyeballs means no victory. But wait! Rather then focus on issues, what if we attack the other candidate as a bastard unworthy of the job? People like sensationalism and soap opera. Doesn't drive away people who disagree with us on issues, and our supporters will like it too. Our would be opponents will vote for us to stop the bastard from entering office! Perfect! The only people who get offended are the people who actually CARE about issues, and they're too small a segment to worry about.
If we actually had an election based on ISSUES, people like third parties might actually start to gain more public mindshare. But in a street fight, they're irrelevant and can be safely ignored.
On the whole I think the averaging effect of having large parties is fairly safe - it prevents most oddballs from gaining more power than they should have. But when they totally ignore issues and attack personality their averaging effect becomes almost an apathy. People who care have no voice, and the system doesn't want them to. Those people are too annoying and upset the power structure.
OK, I'm getting cynical again. Maybe I'm justified, maybe I'm not. But our current system has put a LOT of people in the position of voting AGAINST Bush rather than for any particular candidate. That's a heck of a way to have to vote.
Just what I wanted. (Disclaimer: I haven't seen these particular movies, so perhaps they are better than I'm guessing based on ROTJ.)
I always viewed Ewoks as the first sign of the trend that eventually peaked with one Jar-Jar Binks. I heard somewhere Endor was originally supposed to be full of Wookies - what happened to that?? That would have worked. Instead we had teddy bears fighting stormtroopers in armor with rocks! (BTY, I nominate stormtrooper armor for the Most Useless Armor Ever, based mostly on the Ewok battle.)
Thank goodness for Timothy Zahn. Without him I think I would have abandoned Star Wars.
I still don't get how anybody can even THINK of abandoning manned space travel. Sure, humans are fragile and expensive. Sure, it's cheaper to send robots. But CRIPES, people. It's an adventure! It's a new experience for the human race. That, IN AND OF ITSELF, is more than enough justification for continuing.
I know all the arguements about how we should fix our problems down here on earth before we pour $$ into space, but I've got news for those people. We're never going to fix those problems. They are caused by human beings. If we wait for the day when everything is hunky dory on this planet, we might as well give up any exploration of any kind.
Dreams are IMPORTANT. That sense of wonder you felt as a little kid looking up at the sky, that's IMPORTANT. Exploration tests us, pushes us, forces us to grow beyond what we thought possible. It seems to be the only way we do that without killing each other in the process. Keeping the mind engaged and interested is essential to who we are as a species.
That's how I feel, anyway. I know there are those who's end vision for the human race seems to be having us all sit in front of the TV while robots do all the work necessary to sustain our physical existance. Well, no thanks. I'll head for the frontier. There's a thought from one of Frank Herbert's books which I consider relevant to both our present and the more degenerate visions of our future:
"It's because there is no Dune there are no Fremen."
Here's the question I find interesting. PostgreSQL is widely considered to be an awesome database system. What does Oracle have that PostgreSQL doesn't? What else does PostgreSQL need to be considered the equal or better of Oracle?
They seem to have a lot of praise from users, not just market speak. And technical users yet.
I'd be very, VERY surprised if Sun allows Dtrace into the open source world, at least not for a while. If Dtrace really is the supertool it seems to be, and is actually and massively UNIQUE, it represents a reason peole will move to Solaris and buy Sun's hardware to do it. Maybe the closest thing to a Unix killer app that has existed for a while.
Now eventually (as in five years down the road) it will probably pay for Sun to open it up. If I were them, I'd milk it for all its worth on the "get people to move to Sun boxes" mantra, while the rest of the world trys (and probably fails) to duplicate the tool. Then, when Sun has gotten all the converts they are likely to, start making the tool even BETTER by opening it up and letting the world go to town on it. (GPL or something similar so Sun can incorporate back in the goodies.)
Of course, that's just an off the cuff theory by someone who doesn't know.
Debian is something different from most other Linux distributions - it is the absolute high ground, the place which could withstand a legal flood that would wash away any other distribution in existance. That is its function, in my view. There is Redhat/Fedora for pragmatic server use, Mandrake for latest and greatest and friendliest. Debian is adhering to a PRINCIPLE.
Most of us don't like adhering to principles - it really sucks because you have to give up things. In this case you give up convenience and non-free software being hidden safely in the background. For many people that price is too high. That's fine - use another distro! There are others who cater to that. Anyone using Debian has no business objecting to that philosophy - it is the primary reason Debian exists. People not contributing it have no voice at all, nor should they expect one. Think they're dumb for not being pragmatic? Guess how much that matters.
Debian is what happens when you take potential legal problems to heart and try to do what it takes to avoid them. I rather suspect that Debian ultimately wants there to be ZERO chance of any successful lawsuit about anything in the distribution, although I don't know if that is an explicit policy. That's hard, in our society. (What they probably REALLY want is no chance of a lawsuit being brought against them period, but the laws of the US at least don't allow that.)
Debian is about Freedom first, and software second. I see no problem with them releasing and then implimenting the policy changes, since there is not likely to be any increased risk compared to their current release. But if I'm wrong for whatever reason, they should ignore all critics and take whatever time they need to Do It Right. That is done too little nowadays, particularly in Free Software where theoretically Doing It Right is the motivation.
"'I don't trust Microsoft and Intel to do it right.'
And they speak so highly of you. Despite crappy business practices, they actually have some talented people that produce some good solid work. If you want to be paranoid, why don't you look up EFI and cross reference with DRM?"
It could be argued that the DRM tendancies of Microsoft/Intel are a reason not to trust them to do it right. As far as DRM goes, I would tend to define a BIOS with that in it as NOT doing it right.
Glad to see there is attention being paid to the firmware end of things both commercially and as open source - that's one area your average geek is a little leary of toying with, due to Inoperative Hardware potential.
What I always worry about is the non-techical end of these things. BIOS level control on what software a computer can run is a much harder obstruction to overcome than things like driver issues. I wonder if they won't use the "Next Generation" mantra to say this is the perfect time to pass legislation that requires DRM control be built into all computational devices. OpenBIOS wouldn't be of much use if DRM laws require a closed system.
Also, if firmware gets too smart, you might get things like a DVD drive refusing to play a movie unless your operating system can guarantee it that you computer doesn't have the ability to copy content illegally.
When you can program games in BIOS level systems, I start to get a little wary. Keep my BIOS to the minimum please - configuration options needed to handle my hardware (things like boot order, low level configuration options the OS shouldn't know about, etc.) should be all the capability needed. A BIOS should be simple, efficient, and stick precisely to its job. I've got an OS for the rest. If the new system is good for that type of work, excellent. But if the hardware starts getting too smart for its own good, then I might wind up hauling out those two Sun Ultra 1s I bought - they should run more or less forever and I'll live with slower speeds in order to stick with a consumer friendly machine.
Seriously people, let's thing about this. Newer and more feature rich software is going to be more resource intensive. (Particularly eye candy.) The point is, if you don't want it you don't have to install it. Don't like what Redhat, Mandrake, Suse, etc. are doing? No problem - there's Debian, Gentoo, Slackware, all the way down to little mini distros designed to run off of two floppy disks. Distros doing "latest and greatest" are going to be less streamlined, and new feature rich development is going to occur on faster machines. There is a REASON for all the linux distros out there - they all do different things and address different needs. It's called CHOICE.
Now, if you want to take the position that any reasonable program/environment/whatever shouldn't need more than X amount of resources, I'd probably agree with you. BUT. It's not important right now - hardware is still cheaper than time. At some point, someday, hardware will probably hit the atomic limit and then things will come down to software and architecture design. But those are MAJOR time investments, to do things right, and only worth doing if you have a static target to aim for. Look at how few programs survive a change like DOS->Windows3.11->Win95-WinXP. Particularly commerical ones. If you program for one target, when that target goes the program usually does too. Or it undergoes major revisions, if it's lucky.
Also keep in mind that to some extent modularity has a resource cost. Microkernel vs. monolithic is the classical case, but there are others. Abstraction always implies a resource penalty, since you aren't doing all the clever low level stuff to make things faster. In my opinion, the benefits outweigh the loss in most cases though. Look at what you get - understandable, modular code that is easier to maintain and use. That translates to fewer man hours, which are the most valuable resource.
Anyway, Debian in my experience performs very well on machines on which I have it installed. Gentoo is what I use for my desktop at home, but I don't recommend that for the casual user.
Yes. I simply copied my XFree86 config file over to the new name.
No changes I'm aware of to configuration methods yet, so it's probably not "better" in that sense. However, now that things are more open, if support develops for some better method that's proposed there's every chance it could happen:-).
As far as the end user is concerned, there are relatively few differences between X.org and XFree86 at this point. X.org is a fork of XFree86, and even if they were gung ho to change everything no project the size of XFree86 is going to get radically altered overnight. (Which I don't think they are, bty.)
I made the switch on Gentoo, where it was very painless. For distros without such a smooth upgrade path and/or non-geek inclined folk it might be better to wait for the next release of the distro (since a foobared X install is a little hard to fix without experience on the command line.) But if you're worried about programs not working or anything like that, there shouldn't be any issues at this point.
The experimental work is, IIRC, focused primarily on the freedesktop Xserver. The major difference between X.org and XFree86 is things will get fixed sooner, driver releases will be better handled, etc. The license change was just the last in a long, long line of problems - fixes made by the cygwin folk, for example, were rotting without ever being applied to the main tree. I don't know all the details of that incident, but I don't think it is the only such either. The XFree86 team wasn't so worried about being responsive to the needs of XFree86 users. (Which is their right, of course, since most of us aren't paying them. But nor should they be surprised by a fork.) X.org is the place for people who want XFree86, but managed correctly and in an open manner. Those who want adventure and bleading edge should scope out freedesktop.org. I don't know what will happen to XFree86 - likely they will keep on the way they have been, with fewer users. I get the sense this won't bother them much, either, but I could be wrong.
"Why can't someone just build a good calculator that does what it's supposed to, and not some calculator / PDA / laptop / Borg monstrosity?"
Because stable and reliable doesn't convey "status" like the "latest IN gadget", and thus marketers don't know what to do with it.
When's the last time you saw an ad for anything that featured detailed description of the actual merits of the product, as opposed to pretty people having fun/doing work/both? I've never heard a commercial for a car say, for example, talk about the technical details of the car and the manufacturing process. It's always a picture of the vehicle doing things no ordinary sane driver would ever do, and then a price and a lot of fine print. Or an annoying used car salesman shouting to get your attention.
Marketing drives EVERYTHING. And there's nothing exciting about basic, solid and reliable. Plus, if you buy a basic, solid, reliable product the company doesn't see any more of your money for ten years. Hence, the trend is away from long term products, however wasteful that might be.
Maybe I'm stuck in cynical mode, but quality sure doesn't seem to be the driving force nowadays.
If they're serious, they won't allow the market to reject this. The will get laws passed that make it ILLEGAL not to play their game. I.e. - if you want to use a computer, you must use a DRM enabled, approved machine. Which will only be available as loans from companies. Anyone using anything else is illegally using an unlicensed computational device, and subject to fines and imprisonment.
Any time really large companies can't get what they want from the market place, they look elsewhere. And thanks to the influence money has on elections, they often get what they want. That's why large companies are so unbelievably bad for a free market system.
"peppering the countryside with ugly, intusive and pretty feeble wind turbines."
Which are also clean. I hear this complaint a lot, but at least they have less of the "not in my backyard" problems that nuclear does. I agree nuclear needs to be rethought, but my feel on this is all viable renewable sources need to be developed. We will get used to wind turbines - I'd rather have them everywhere than be the one to deal with the nuclear waste produced by nuclear plants. (Storing something for 10000 years is a problem. I do know a little about that.)
Comments on microkernels...
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More From Tanenbaum
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· Score: 2, Interesting
"What's the big deal about turning a 3.0 GHz PC into a 2.4 GHz PC due to a microkernel? Surely you once bought a machine appreciably slower than 2.4 GHz and were very happy with it. I would easily give up 20% in performance for a system that was robust, reliable, and wasn't susceptible to many of the ills we see in today's massive operating systems."
Amen. I think whatever eventually becomes the Next Big Thing in open source operating systems will be microkernel based, or at least accept the idea that a performance hit like 20% is worth it for a robust setup. (I'm hoping it will be EROS or some variation thereof, but who knows.)
"Come on, the Zahn books were even worse than the prequels."
Gotta disagree with you there. I loved the Zahn books.
"The story arc was *identical* to the original trilogy, but with such "clever" substitutions as a mining city built on top of AT-ATs instead of antigravity systems, and the Katana (nice breach of continuity, that name) fleet instead of the two Death Stars."
Katana fleet - eh. That didn't bother me so much. The AT-AT thing I thought was clever - it was a nifty application of known technology to a plausible problem. Working entirely within the universe like that and still creating something nifty is not so simple. It has whatever fiction's equiliant to the "ring of truth" would be.
"The characterizations were only vaguely reminiscent of those in the films."
I would say they had matured. Made sense - trying to found a Republic will do that to you. I thought they were actually portrayed very well. Remember, too - in books you have a different level of intimacy with the characters than on a TV screen.
"Every planet had a name with seven apostrophes in it. The evil Ewok ninja creatures were totally dorky, and so were the bevy of characters (e.g. Thrawn, Mara Jada) who were always conveniently off-screen during the films."
Huh - there again I enjoyed all those elements. (Well, not so worried about planet names, but these at least didn't grate on me like some have.)
"It was full of lame prequel-esque stunts like the one where Luke slides down a wall by holding his saber in one hand to gouge a recess and his other to grip it as it's created."
As opposed to falling down a huge shaft and getting sucked out an exhaust port? I thought again that was a clever use of known technology. Nothing terribly over the top about it. Nowhere near jumping out of a flying car and landing safely.
"The only official Star Wars material I've read that was worse than the Zahn books was the Crystal one with the machines that suck people's souls out with arcs of electricity."
Then you have missed some (or maybe they weren't official). Some of them are OK, but there are a few pieces of steaming turd out there too.
"I do agree about the surfing on lava thing. I knew Lucas was going to figure out some way to make this potentially awesome film terrible. This just further convinces me that he's going to do something totally stupid to the original trilogy for the DVD release, like stick some Gungans in the Mos Eisley cantina and/or piloting ships at the battle of Endor."
Probably. He already messed up the ending of ROTJ.
Isn't there any chance this could be defeated based on obviousness? There have been desktop features which change as a function of time, and there have been transparent windows (Fresco, if nothing else, has demonstrated true transparency. Although without the time related aspects.) So doing things with transparency as a function of time is now innovative?
This is getting silly. I can suggest possible uses of transparency including a translucent news feeder running as a desktop background, a file manager where larger files are less translucent than smaller ones, or where translucency is used to indicate permissions (opaque files are read and write, translucent ones are read but not write, and more translucent ones are neither read nor write.) These are off the top of my head - perhaps with more thought I could arrive at others, maybe even something useful. The point is if you have the technical possibility of transparency, a lot of things are going to occur to any desktop designer worth their salt. But I'm not sure how you would indicate that this is "obvious" to the patent office, since there is not likely to be any papers out there on the use of transparency in desktops. It's just not something people have thought about at all yet, since no one but Apple has actually had them to consider as practical concerns.
Maybe the place to look is games - those GUIs are probably the most relevant to this issue. But please, for the love of $DEITY someone convince the patent office that computer specific patents shouldn't last 20 years! As far as the market cycle of computers is concerned, you might as well have granted them an eternal monopoly, particularly where free software is concerned. Look at freetype - they are still waiting out an Apple patent on how to optimally handle fonts and will be for years.
I've suggested it before, but here is another good indicator of why it would be useful. Let's get a new type of filing at the patent office - Documentation of Prior Art. This type could be filed at no cost to the filer, since its only purpose is to describe an idea and not to profit off of it. We could put down all the obvious ideas these companies want to patent, and without having to pay the huge $$$ for a patent filing get things on record. THEN, have the patent office be finanically liable if they grant a patent which is overturned later using something in the Documentation of Prior Art database, which they will HAVE to go through as part of their own knowledge database.
Most of the problem is the patent office just doesn't know what is and isn't obvious in computers. So their approach is grant the patent and let the courts figure it out. Which is deadly to open source. The system needs to change, or eventually someone will pull a patent trigger the way SCO pulled the IP/derivative works trigger. Only with patents the chamber might not be empty.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it's science oriented, but the Grace plotting program uses motif and I find it extremely useful.
;-) I do use emacs, but only when something heavy duty is required.)
Geomview, iirc, is also motif based.
Then there is Nedit, which is still my favorite casual text editor. (Sorry emacs/vi crowds
For mainstream desktop programs, you may be right. But believe me there is a LOT more out there than that, and a lot of the more specialty programs would be a LOT of work to convert to another toolkit. More to the point, scientists (for example) often don't even add a good build system, to say nothing of being able to casually switch toolkits.
So yes, there are a fair number of Motif apps - it's just that they aren't as mainstream as Gnome/KDE.
I appreciate and largely agree with your presentation on the state of systems research, but one area where there are perhaps both academic and commercial points of interest is the security/reliability question.
(I should point out I consider these two things to be closely related, since a compromised system cannot be considered a reliable one.)
I agree people have largely decided how they want to use computers, but I don't think anyone can dispute that while computers and software today might provide people with the functionality they want they do not do it in a robust manner. I would think there are a great many interesting problems surrounding figuring out how to impliment a proven, uncrackable software system that provides the functionality people want today.
I had hopes that the EROS system might prove to be the first step in this direction, but research on it has slowed to virtually nothing. But in addition to designing from the ground up in a truly paranoid fashion, they used proof logic to verify key mechanisms of their security structure. I know there are distinct limits to this approach, but I have always wondered if, working within these limits, a system that provides today's expected functionality could be created.
(Note when I say functionality I refer primarily to end user applications like the spreadsheet, database, and word processor. Other types of change in the user environment, so long as they are changed for a reason where benefits are real to the end user, are fine.)
Could you comment on this as a possible future direction for computer research?
There exists a point where economic interests, given a political system which can be bribed, become so powerful that they effectively have total control of the system. As far as the downward spiral of individual liberty at the expense of corporate profit, this is the Point of No Return. Yes, on the books they don't have the power, but practical realities and what the books say are often very different things.
Realistically, the power of the people to speak louder than money is only felt if a) said people are interested in exercising that power at the expense of personal convenience and b) they are willing to think for themselves. This seldom happens, and only when things get Really Bad. I'm not talking about IP laws, I'm talking about not being able to get the basics of life. Abstract economics doesn't get people excited, because its not important enough. Tomorrow's meal or the kid's latest cold is what's important for most people.
As long as powerful economic interests are able to keep most of the people relatively comfortable, they will never have to deal with popular uprising about MP3 downloading or stupid patents. People ignore these things unless it impacts them personally, and it seldom does enough to hurt.
Beyond the Point of No Return, corporate power is able to use the statistics of democracy to run the country. Barring the crumbling of their power due to total economic collapse, they control the media and can use it to influence and placate people as they see fit.
So brace yourself geeks, because we don't have a Voice. We are without economic or political power, and we are so small a minority in the democratic whole we can be ignored no matter how loud we yell. Because most people don't care about what we care about. In a two party system, massive numbers and middle of the road are the order. We are neither.
Which doesn't mean we should just go gentle into that good night, but bear in mind the patent system being profitable to the people abusing it is more politically important than the little (relatively quiet) guy being squashed. If we fight, we need to fight smart and not charge at the problem head on. Because we might as well be a flea going head to head with a rhino.
Koffice, although its import/export filters historically have left something to be desired. Unlike OpenOffice, you just get a "clean" feel when you start it up. Not super bloated, and the default layout doesn't waste lots of screen space with wide margins around the image of the paper (I know that's a stupid nitpick, but it's been driving me nuts about OpenOffice.org)
Now the KDE integration efforts for OO have made it quite a bit nicer to look at under KDE, for which I am grateful. But I still have to say I hope KOffice becomes a front runner for Linux office suites. If everybody uses the OO XML document standard that's in the works they can all compete on an equal footing, and Koffice documents could be read by OO on Windows. Koffice is a nice piece of work, but (partially due to their KDE only status) they have had a hard time getting the critical mass of developers needed to do what they're trying to do. Without the power of KDE+QT they wouldn't be anywhere NEAR where they are now, as far as I can tell.
I wish Apple or someone would decide to use the KOffice setup (yeah that would be a lot of work, but still...) and give KOffice enough full time developers to get all the annoying little features stuffed in. Feature parity with OpenOffice.org is a must, and with MSOffice would be ideal. People are used to those features, and in a game like Office software that's all that matters.
I suspect we will never have universal security in the computer world, as long as it takes any effort on the part of the end user. Which leads to several conclusions:
a) Social Engineering will ALWAYS succeed. Whatever engineers do to protect a computer, they can only protect the user from themselves up to a point. There's no cure for giving someone you think you trust your username and password, for example, and then having them rip of your confidential data. Or for that matter, keeping people from answering emails using information they shouldn't. It's a grim conclusion, but short of warning people not to be trusting nothing can be done.
b) The machine itself CAN be made much more secure by default. This usually comes at the cost of user-friendlyness, but the username/password/account idea seems to be virtually universal now. The key to making a user friendly secure machine for the average consumer is to set up rules that allow the machine to do everything the user is likely to want to do, and ONLY that. In other words, some form of Mandatory Access Control. This is a pain in the neck for those who want to do lots of complex things on their machine, but I suspect the average needs of the modern user are becoming well defined enough to achieve something. And if applications AS PART OF THE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS create rules for what their program needs to be allowed to do (which can be externally audited to keep them honest) we might achieve a situation where it's difficult to impossible for a computer to be cracked from the outside through technological means.
c) The bad news is, there's no market for b) and so it's unlikely it will ever happen. People have to be willing to pay the price for security, and I suspect up front cost of inconvenience (either to developers, end users, or both) will be seen as greater than the statistical potential of dangerous information theft. Whether that's true or not I don't know, certainly it varies on an individual level, but it takes herds of users to fund commercial software development and I suspect the average consumer response will be the immediate path of least inconvenience.
d) Open Source, being outside normal economic constraints, might produce something like b) eventually. But while individual projects might code to such standards, they are probably too high a median to set for casual, unpaid development. Success would require most of the open source community to be willing to do extensive testing and planning for running their software in a MAC environment, and that's not much fun to most non-security oriented developers.
e) So, in the end, matters will only improve when the costs of electronic theft and attack are so high they raise demand for secure systems to the economic minimum. Whether that will ever happen I don't know. My cynical guess is it won't - we'll just have to live with it. (Individual geeks of course can try to do better, but the internet has become a community. For better or worse.)
This is just a guess, but I think every movie garners a certain "integrity" in the technologies which were used to make it. Certain techniques were used to create it, and the movie audiences know based on viewing LOTS of TV and films over the years what fits and what doesn't (perhaps without quite appreciating it). CGI doesn't fit in the original Star Wars, at least not for major visible additions (clean up and touch up is fine).
Of course, a lot of it is nostalgia, too. But what's wrong with that? I still don't get why Lucas doesn't do a "historical release" and make another zillion bucks.
I'm curious as to why they chose the particular tools they did. I don't know too much about these issues, but from what I understand the NSA's selinux patches are a very robust and powerful set of tools. IIRC Redhat has been integrating it into their systems. It may be that this isn't the best choice, but I'd be curious if someone who knows them well could give us a rundown of why some solutions might be better/worse.
One issue with selinux I (think) I understand is that in order for applications to run properly you need to have predefined rules which allow them to do what they need to do (the nature of MAC is they can't do anything except what is explicitly allowed, as I understand it). This is possible for servers, which do only a few jobs repeatedly, but for a desktop machine with hundreds of potential applications to fire up and more being developed such a burden becomes huge. A normal user would end up turning off MAC in order to use the computer the way they want to, unless each application they want or may want to use already has a default ruleset present. I would be really happy to see this happen - various distributions collaborate on default rules for large numbers of applications, so end users could actually use systems that are seriously hardened. I know it's probably overkill, but given what casual Windows users on the network have done over the years (as well as unsecured Linux boxes and other OSes, for that matter) I think if some combination of projects could deliver a usable desktop machine with mandatory access control and any other features which might defend their box while letting it be useful would be a Very Good Thing. One thing is for sure - too little security does more harm to the internet community than having more protection than you need.
I'm waiting to see the license terms before I celebrate.
Frankly, I doubt many people vote on anything more weighty than who looks the best in front of a camera.
And the current system encourages that. Did you ever stop to wonder why there seems to be so little discussion of issues? It's because that's not how you win.
People who actually take the time to think about issues will have an opinion, and probably a strong one. Hence, a political party taking the opposite stance from the one the person decides on won't get their vote. Then there's the problem that most people WON'T think about it, and tune you out as annoying. Thinking is uncomfortable. And no ears/eyeballs means no victory. But wait! Rather then focus on issues, what if we attack the other candidate as a bastard unworthy of the job? People like sensationalism and soap opera. Doesn't drive away people who disagree with us on issues, and our supporters will like it too. Our would be opponents will vote for us to stop the bastard from entering office! Perfect! The only people who get offended are the people who actually CARE about issues, and they're too small a segment to worry about.
If we actually had an election based on ISSUES, people like third parties might actually start to gain more public mindshare. But in a street fight, they're irrelevant and can be safely ignored.
On the whole I think the averaging effect of having large parties is fairly safe - it prevents most oddballs from gaining more power than they should have. But when they totally ignore issues and attack personality their averaging effect becomes almost an apathy. People who care have no voice, and the system doesn't want them to. Those people are too annoying and upset the power structure.
OK, I'm getting cynical again. Maybe I'm justified, maybe I'm not. But our current system has put a LOT of people in the position of voting AGAINST Bush rather than for any particular candidate. That's a heck of a way to have to vote.
Just what I wanted. (Disclaimer: I haven't seen these particular movies, so perhaps they are better than I'm guessing based on ROTJ.)
I always viewed Ewoks as the first sign of the trend that eventually peaked with one Jar-Jar Binks. I heard somewhere Endor was originally supposed to be full of Wookies - what happened to that?? That would have worked. Instead we had teddy bears fighting stormtroopers in armor with rocks! (BTY, I nominate stormtrooper armor for the Most Useless Armor Ever, based mostly on the Ewok battle.)
Thank goodness for Timothy Zahn. Without him I think I would have abandoned Star Wars.
I still don't get how anybody can even THINK of abandoning manned space travel. Sure, humans are fragile and expensive. Sure, it's cheaper to send robots. But CRIPES, people. It's an adventure! It's a new experience for the human race. That, IN AND OF ITSELF, is more than enough justification for continuing.
I know all the arguements about how we should fix our problems down here on earth before we pour $$ into space, but I've got news for those people. We're never going to fix those problems. They are caused by human beings. If we wait for the day when everything is hunky dory on this planet, we might as well give up any exploration of any kind.
Dreams are IMPORTANT. That sense of wonder you felt as a little kid looking up at the sky, that's IMPORTANT. Exploration tests us, pushes us, forces us to grow beyond what we thought possible. It seems to be the only way we do that without killing each other in the process. Keeping the mind engaged and interested is essential to who we are as a species.
That's how I feel, anyway. I know there are those who's end vision for the human race seems to be having us all sit in front of the TV while robots do all the work necessary to sustain our physical existance. Well, no thanks. I'll head for the frontier. There's a thought from one of Frank Herbert's books which I consider relevant to both our present and the more degenerate visions of our future:
"It's because there is no Dune there are no Fremen."
Here's the question I find interesting. PostgreSQL is widely considered to be an awesome database system. What does Oracle have that PostgreSQL doesn't? What else does PostgreSQL need to be considered the equal or better of Oracle?
They seem to have a lot of praise from users, not just market speak. And technical users yet.
I'd be very, VERY surprised if Sun allows Dtrace into the open source world, at least not for a while. If Dtrace really is the supertool it seems to be, and is actually and massively UNIQUE, it represents a reason peole will move to Solaris and buy Sun's hardware to do it. Maybe the closest thing to a Unix killer app that has existed for a while.
Now eventually (as in five years down the road) it will probably pay for Sun to open it up. If I were them, I'd milk it for all its worth on the "get people to move to Sun boxes" mantra, while the rest of the world trys (and probably fails) to duplicate the tool. Then, when Sun has gotten all the converts they are likely to, start making the tool even BETTER by opening it up and letting the world go to town on it. (GPL or something similar so Sun can incorporate back in the goodies.)
Of course, that's just an off the cuff theory by someone who doesn't know.
Debian is something different from most other Linux distributions - it is the absolute high ground, the place which could withstand a legal flood that would wash away any other distribution in existance. That is its function, in my view. There is Redhat/Fedora for pragmatic server use, Mandrake for latest and greatest and friendliest. Debian is adhering to a PRINCIPLE.
Most of us don't like adhering to principles - it really sucks because you have to give up things. In this case you give up convenience and non-free software being hidden safely in the background. For many people that price is too high. That's fine - use another distro! There are others who cater to that. Anyone using Debian has no business objecting to that philosophy - it is the primary reason Debian exists. People not contributing it have no voice at all, nor should they expect one. Think they're dumb for not being pragmatic? Guess how much that matters.
Debian is what happens when you take potential legal problems to heart and try to do what it takes to avoid them. I rather suspect that Debian ultimately wants there to be ZERO chance of any successful lawsuit about anything in the distribution, although I don't know if that is an explicit policy. That's hard, in our society. (What they probably REALLY want is no chance of a lawsuit being brought against them period, but the laws of the US at least don't allow that.)
Debian is about Freedom first, and software second. I see no problem with them releasing and then implimenting the policy changes, since there is not likely to be any increased risk compared to their current release. But if I'm wrong for whatever reason, they should ignore all critics and take whatever time they need to Do It Right. That is done too little nowadays, particularly in Free Software where theoretically Doing It Right is the motivation.
"'I don't trust Microsoft and Intel to do it right.'
And they speak so highly of you. Despite crappy business practices, they actually have some talented people that produce some good solid work. If you want to be paranoid, why don't you look up EFI and cross reference with DRM?"
It could be argued that the DRM tendancies of Microsoft/Intel are a reason not to trust them to do it right. As far as DRM goes, I would tend to define a BIOS with that in it as NOT doing it right.
Glad to see there is attention being paid to the firmware end of things both commercially and as open source - that's one area your average geek is a little leary of toying with, due to Inoperative Hardware potential.
What I always worry about is the non-techical end of these things. BIOS level control on what software a computer can run is a much harder obstruction to overcome than things like driver issues. I wonder if they won't use the "Next Generation" mantra to say this is the perfect time to pass legislation that requires DRM control be built into all computational devices. OpenBIOS wouldn't be of much use if DRM laws require a closed system.
Also, if firmware gets too smart, you might get things like a DVD drive refusing to play a movie unless your operating system can guarantee it that you computer doesn't have the ability to copy content illegally.
When you can program games in BIOS level systems, I start to get a little wary. Keep my BIOS to the minimum please - configuration options needed to handle my hardware (things like boot order, low level configuration options the OS shouldn't know about, etc.) should be all the capability needed. A BIOS should be simple, efficient, and stick precisely to its job. I've got an OS for the rest. If the new system is good for that type of work, excellent. But if the hardware starts getting too smart for its own good, then I might wind up hauling out those two Sun Ultra 1s I bought - they should run more or less forever and I'll live with slower speeds in order to stick with a consumer friendly machine.
Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh. OK, I feel better now.
Seriously people, let's thing about this. Newer and more feature rich software is going to be more resource intensive. (Particularly eye candy.) The point is, if you don't want it you don't have to install it. Don't like what Redhat, Mandrake, Suse, etc. are doing? No problem - there's Debian, Gentoo, Slackware, all the way down to little mini distros designed to run off of two floppy disks. Distros doing "latest and greatest" are going to be less streamlined, and new feature rich development is going to occur on faster machines. There is a REASON for all the linux distros out there - they all do different things and address different needs. It's called CHOICE.
Now, if you want to take the position that any reasonable program/environment/whatever shouldn't need more than X amount of resources, I'd probably agree with you. BUT. It's not important right now - hardware is still cheaper than time. At some point, someday, hardware will probably hit the atomic limit and then things will come down to software and architecture design. But those are MAJOR time investments, to do things right, and only worth doing if you have a static target to aim for. Look at how few programs survive a change like DOS->Windows3.11->Win95-WinXP. Particularly commerical ones. If you program for one target, when that target goes the program usually does too. Or it undergoes major revisions, if it's lucky.
Also keep in mind that to some extent modularity has a resource cost. Microkernel vs. monolithic is the classical case, but there are others. Abstraction always implies a resource penalty, since you aren't doing all the clever low level stuff to make things faster. In my opinion, the benefits outweigh the loss in most cases though. Look at what you get - understandable, modular code that is easier to maintain and use. That translates to fewer man hours, which are the most valuable resource.
Anyway, Debian in my experience performs very well on machines on which I have it installed. Gentoo is what I use for my desktop at home, but I don't recommend that for the casual user.
"Is it compatible with the XFree86 config files?"
:-).
Yes. I simply copied my XFree86 config file over to the new name.
No changes I'm aware of to configuration methods yet, so it's probably not "better" in that sense. However, now that things are more open, if support develops for some better method that's proposed there's every chance it could happen
As far as the end user is concerned, there are relatively few differences between X.org and XFree86 at this point. X.org is a fork of XFree86, and even if they were gung ho to change everything no project the size of XFree86 is going to get radically altered overnight. (Which I don't think they are, bty.)
I made the switch on Gentoo, where it was very painless. For distros without such a smooth upgrade path and/or non-geek inclined folk it might be better to wait for the next release of the distro (since a foobared X install is a little hard to fix without experience on the command line.) But if you're worried about programs not working or anything like that, there shouldn't be any issues at this point.
The experimental work is, IIRC, focused primarily on the freedesktop Xserver. The major difference between X.org and XFree86 is things will get fixed sooner, driver releases will be better handled, etc. The license change was just the last in a long, long line of problems - fixes made by the cygwin folk, for example, were rotting without ever being applied to the main tree. I don't know all the details of that incident, but I don't think it is the only such either. The XFree86 team wasn't so worried about being responsive to the needs of XFree86 users. (Which is their right, of course, since most of us aren't paying them. But nor should they be surprised by a fork.) X.org is the place for people who want XFree86, but managed correctly and in an open manner. Those who want adventure and bleading edge should scope out freedesktop.org. I don't know what will happen to XFree86 - likely they will keep on the way they have been, with fewer users. I get the sense this won't bother them much, either, but I could be wrong.
"Why can't someone just build a good calculator that does what it's supposed to, and not some calculator / PDA / laptop / Borg monstrosity?"
Because stable and reliable doesn't convey "status" like the "latest IN gadget", and thus marketers don't know what to do with it.
When's the last time you saw an ad for anything that featured detailed description of the actual merits of the product, as opposed to pretty people having fun/doing work/both? I've never heard a commercial for a car say, for example, talk about the technical details of the car and the manufacturing process. It's always a picture of the vehicle doing things no ordinary sane driver would ever do, and then a price and a lot of fine print. Or an annoying used car salesman shouting to get your attention.
Marketing drives EVERYTHING. And there's nothing exciting about basic, solid and reliable. Plus, if you buy a basic, solid, reliable product the company doesn't see any more of your money for ten years. Hence, the trend is away from long term products, however wasteful that might be.
Maybe I'm stuck in cynical mode, but quality sure doesn't seem to be the driving force nowadays.
If they're serious, they won't allow the market to reject this. The will get laws passed that make it ILLEGAL not to play their game. I.e. - if you want to use a computer, you must use a DRM enabled, approved machine. Which will only be available as loans from companies. Anyone using anything else is illegally using an unlicensed computational device, and subject to fines and imprisonment.
Any time really large companies can't get what they want from the market place, they look elsewhere. And thanks to the influence money has on elections, they often get what they want. That's why large companies are so unbelievably bad for a free market system.
"peppering the countryside with ugly, intusive and pretty feeble wind turbines."
Which are also clean. I hear this complaint a lot, but at least they have less of the "not in my backyard" problems that nuclear does. I agree nuclear needs to be rethought, but my feel on this is all viable renewable sources need to be developed. We will get used to wind turbines - I'd rather have them everywhere than be the one to deal with the nuclear waste produced by nuclear plants. (Storing something for 10000 years is a problem. I do know a little about that.)
"What's the big deal about turning a 3.0 GHz PC into a 2.4 GHz PC due to a microkernel? Surely you once bought a machine appreciably slower than 2.4 GHz and were very happy with it. I would easily give up 20% in performance for a system that was robust, reliable, and wasn't susceptible to many of the ills we see in today's massive operating systems."
Amen. I think whatever eventually becomes the Next Big Thing in open source operating systems will be microkernel based, or at least accept the idea that a performance hit like 20% is worth it for a robust setup. (I'm hoping it will be EROS or some variation thereof, but who knows.)
"Come on, the Zahn books were even worse than the prequels."
Gotta disagree with you there. I loved the Zahn books.
"The story arc was *identical* to the original trilogy, but with such "clever" substitutions as a mining city built on top of AT-ATs instead of antigravity systems, and the Katana (nice breach of continuity, that name) fleet instead of the two Death Stars."
Katana fleet - eh. That didn't bother me so much. The AT-AT thing I thought was clever - it was a nifty application of known technology to a plausible problem. Working entirely within the universe like that and still creating something nifty is not so simple. It has whatever fiction's equiliant to the "ring of truth" would be.
"The characterizations were only vaguely reminiscent of those in the films."
I would say they had matured. Made sense - trying to found a Republic will do that to you. I thought they were actually portrayed very well. Remember, too - in books you have a different level of intimacy with the characters than on a TV screen.
"Every planet had a name with seven apostrophes in it. The evil Ewok ninja creatures were totally dorky, and so were the bevy of characters (e.g. Thrawn, Mara Jada) who were always conveniently off-screen during the films."
Huh - there again I enjoyed all those elements. (Well, not so worried about planet names, but these at least didn't grate on me like some have.)
"It was full of lame prequel-esque stunts like the one where Luke slides down a wall by holding his saber in one hand to gouge a recess and his other to grip it as it's created."
As opposed to falling down a huge shaft and getting sucked out an exhaust port? I thought again that was a clever use of known technology. Nothing terribly over the top about it. Nowhere near jumping out of a flying car and landing safely.
"The only official Star Wars material I've read that was worse than the Zahn books was the Crystal one with the machines that suck people's souls out with arcs of electricity."
Then you have missed some (or maybe they weren't official). Some of them are OK, but there are a few pieces of steaming turd out there too.
"I do agree about the surfing on lava thing. I knew Lucas was going to figure out some way to make this potentially awesome film terrible. This just further convinces me that he's going to do something totally stupid to the original trilogy for the DVD release, like stick some Gungans in the Mos Eisley cantina and/or piloting ships at the battle of Endor."
Probably. He already messed up the ending of ROTJ.
Isn't there any chance this could be defeated based on obviousness? There have been desktop features which change as a function of time, and there have been transparent windows (Fresco, if nothing else, has demonstrated true transparency. Although without the time related aspects.) So doing things with transparency as a function of time is now innovative?
This is getting silly. I can suggest possible uses of transparency including a translucent news feeder running as a desktop background, a file manager where larger files are less translucent than smaller ones, or where translucency is used to indicate permissions (opaque files are read and write, translucent ones are read but not write, and more translucent ones are neither read nor write.) These are off the top of my head - perhaps with more thought I could arrive at others, maybe even something useful. The point is if you have the technical possibility of transparency, a lot of things are going to occur to any desktop designer worth their salt. But I'm not sure how you would indicate that this is "obvious" to the patent office, since there is not likely to be any papers out there on the use of transparency in desktops. It's just not something people have thought about at all yet, since no one but Apple has actually had them to consider as practical concerns.
Maybe the place to look is games - those GUIs are probably the most relevant to this issue. But please, for the love of $DEITY someone convince the patent office that computer specific patents shouldn't last 20 years! As far as the market cycle of computers is concerned, you might as well have granted them an eternal monopoly, particularly where free software is concerned. Look at freetype - they are still waiting out an Apple patent on how to optimally handle fonts and will be for years.
I've suggested it before, but here is another good indicator of why it would be useful. Let's get a new type of filing at the patent office - Documentation of Prior Art. This type could be filed at no cost to the filer, since its only purpose is to describe an idea and not to profit off of it. We could put down all the obvious ideas these companies want to patent, and without having to pay the huge $$$ for a patent filing get things on record. THEN, have the patent office be finanically liable if they grant a patent which is overturned later using something in the Documentation of Prior Art database, which they will HAVE to go through as part of their own knowledge database.
Most of the problem is the patent office just doesn't know what is and isn't obvious in computers. So their approach is grant the patent and let the courts figure it out. Which is deadly to open source. The system needs to change, or eventually someone will pull a patent trigger the way SCO pulled the IP/derivative works trigger. Only with patents the chamber might not be empty.