I agree that Google's non-web app development record is spotty. But in fairness Google didn't write most of the apps that you're complaining about. They came from other companies as the result of purchases. Some apps, like Google Earth, were already written in Qt and thus ported easily. Other apps not so easy to port. Google only offered Picasa on Wine because there was some demand for a linux version (not enough to warrant a native port by the original company, obviously) and that was the best way to get it to linux users without having to spend a lot of money, which would have been a complete waste for Google to do. Had google written Picasa themselves, they likely would have used Qt.
Google Chrome is the one exception to all this. Google wrote it, and they really did screw up by not writing it in Qt to begin with.
How much of the ports collection is actually BSD? I bet there is a large amount of Apache, MIT, and other licenses in the mix. I know for a fact there is a large amount of GPL software in ports. The mere existence of ports is not really an argument in favour of the original poster's argument, however. The relative insignificance of the BSD family of OS's despite the court decision back in the day that freed the code, and the dominance of Linux would seem to support the conjecture that a BSD-only ecosystem would not last. Indeed it's likely only because of Linux that BSD is still healthy. Despite the fact that Apple uses a lot of BSD code in their operating system, this has not really benefited the BSDs back directly, further supporting my point. Whereas Oracle can fork a GPL'd distro and no real harm comes to the community. In fact because of the GPL'd nature of the Linux kernel, Oracle is throwing not-insignificant amounts of money at projects that will better Linux for Oracle's purpose (btrfs, etc), while at the same time benefiting the entire community. Oracle is not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. The GPL is, in fact, keeping them honest. The BSD provides much less incentive/deterant, given our current system of human nature, governance, and copyright law.
Not really. It's just a glorified vomit comet with some spectacular views. The real pioneers in commercial space flight are companies like Space-X who are very close to having launch capacity capable of being man-rated for orbital flight! We probably should cancel the Aries launch system and instead partner with Space-X.
In the meantime, Virgin Galactic or whatever it is called is just a glorified thrill ride that does nothing to advance real commercial space flight.
Sounds like you need a new smartphone. My Nokia E65 has integrated VoIP and it can, with a third-party dual-sim adapter, handle multiple SIM chips (though not both at the same time). Most of the Nokia smartphone line that runs symbian has integrated VoIP that works very well.
Yeah the "industry" would love all open source code to be BSD so they can use it with impunity. Honestly let's stop this FUD. It's simply not true. Code under the GPL is no different from code under any other license. If you don't use it in compliance with the license then you are in a copyright violation situation, and the law allows financial remedies for such a case. The fact that it is GPL is irrelevant to this. Also the summary is incorrect. Palm is in a copyright violation now and have three choices: 1. remove the GPL code, 2. license the code under a different arrangement, and 3. License their derivative product as GPL.
Why are you upset when copyright holders exercise their rights under the law to prevent a company from knowingly or unknowingly rip them off? How would BSD help this situation? Because the GPL actually has teeth we're starting to see the tip of the ice berg as far as willful license violations go. It's impossible to judge how much code is being used illegally in proprietary products. We're not talking GPL either. Any license. Microsoft code, code from some other source.
Do liberty and capitalism allow one the right to violate copyrights? The GPL exists to protect the rights and freedoms of the developers and the end users while allowing free redistribution of code. I know of no other license that does this so effectively. In my opinion, if all open source code was BSD, there really would be no open source community or ecosystem. Like Adam Smith said, sometimes you have to balance self-interest with self-interest. The BSD doesn't do that really well. Certainly there is zero incentive for a company to release code under the BSD if it's just going to be used directly against them. The GPL allows companies to foster communities and promote development, while maintaining a level playing field for all the players.
Whether or not the problem is triggered by malware or some MS update, this is still a bug that MS needs to fix. That fact that malware can hide its keys from you through this method should be impetus enough for MS to fix this in programs like regedit. Certainly fixing Windows to properly parse the shell name from the registry key is a no brainer.
Is this like "counterfeit" copies of MS Windows? Where these chips that acted and functioned the same (shadow shift production runs)? Seems like we need a better word as counterfeit implies that it looks the same but does not act the same. Maybe we should just be saying "copies produced without authorization?"
The problem is not that you abused the english language (though this does reduce your persuasiveness), but rather that you made an inflammatory (assertion based on emotion) statement with _nothing_ to back it up originally. Your grammar and childish language did not cause you to be modded down alone. It was your substance, or lack thereof, that got the mod. Mods do have agendas and are sometimes grammar nazis. But by and large, if you speak persuasively and logically you'll be modded up. If you're perceived to be calling someone names or making personal attacks (like "I know more about Javascript than you'll ever know"), that is not persuasive, informative, or insightful. You obviously feel deeply about the issue of Javascript and Ruby, and have responded to my posts twice, so I can tell you really do want to communicate your experience and knowledge. So this is just free, unsolicited, advice.
Also, I suppose that posting an inflammatory statement as AC also contributes a lot to a negative mod.
You misread me. I never said you'd still be able to use Windows after getting a refund. Rather I was pointing out that no material goods change hands. They don't resell your license per se. They just invalidate it. Then they go on to sell XP on another machine for the full prices. So it's not like they are buying back an old license and then trying to resell it at some used market value. There is no used market involved at all.
So if the full price really is $45 today, then a refund should be just that. $45. Not $6. Depreciation has nothing to do with it.
Flawed analogy. And a very different issue. Your vehicle physically wears out, even just sitting there. Rubber gets brittle, hoses and belts crack, rust appears on all exposed metal parts. Normal use wears bearings, shafts, gears, cylinders, valves. Thus its value declines physically. Software is not like that at all. In fact, ASUS just sticks a sticker on and loads the software from a master. It's not like they take back your windows license and resell it as a "pre-owned" license. Rather they give you your $6 and then turn around and put a nice new version on a new computer and charge the full $45.
It's good to know your programming skills are orders of magnitude higher than your articulation skills. If you had mentioned these things in the first place, but dropped the childish language, you're post would likely be moderated a +5 insightful.
Truly spoken like someone who doesn't know appear to know anything about Javascript, and has never programmed anything significant in it. Or Ruby either for that matter. If you do, you should have backed up your comments with real evidence and experience rather than just a few silly expletives.
How does Ruby retain Perl's syntax but not the semantics? Sounds like you're making this up. Have you ever coded anything significant in Ruby? I don't care for Ruby's syntax either (the ability to call functions with () means you can pass functions around as parameters), but that doesn't make Ruby any less powerful as a full OOP, dynamic language.
As for Javascript, try using it for something significant sometime. Write a firefox plugin or something. Javascript is here to stay and is the mainstay of client-end user interface code. Javascript is an extremely powerful and dynamic language, akin to smalltalk in it's power and flexibility. Javascript uses a prototype-based style of OOP that takes some getting used to but is very powerful indeed. Even better Javascript has functional and lisp-like qualities to it. Javascript has its warts. Some of them are apparent if you've ever used Gnome Seed with GTK binding, from what I've read.
Despite all this I'd rather use python in the browser to script DOM objects, but ahh well. I'm also bitter that epiphany dropped Python in favor of Javascript for writing Epiphany plugins. Sigh.
Are you sure about that? Almost all farm windmills were for pumping water. Generating electricity on a small scale never really worked out. It also would never generate enough electricity for the needs of a farm yard. Not even close. So windmills disappeared from farms after the advent of pressure systems. Now that we've found ways to make wind generation of electricity actually practical they are springing up, but they are large mill on a much different scale than the mills farms used to have.
Yes this is true. But it's still coarse. You can restrict what binaries are run, yes. But what about things like controlling access to removable devices? Clearly sudo isn't enough. In fact in the long run PolicyKit will completely replace sudo. So sudo serves some good purposes, particularly in the realm of system administration. But let's not mistake it for a solution to the core problems of security on modern desktop systems.
Anyway, if you want to lock down Fedora for a user, you configure PolicyKit to disallow software installs (just in how you can designate a user in OSX to not be administrative). Personally I'm going to tweak policyKit to turn *on* installation of signed packages on my system.
How many Fedora installations actually have "users" and "admins?" The line that you don't want your users installing software just doesn't hold any water. Honestly if you have an "admin" and "users" you'll be wanting to harden the install anyway, and more than likely you will not want to use Fedora. Instead you'd do CentOS 5 or Ubuntu LTS. Most installs of Fedora are on single-user, home systems. Even in a family situation, a parent will likely want to enable parental controls anyway, so creating a limited account for the kids and using policykit to lock down what they can run (no terminal, etc), is one would do anyway. So bringing up security in the context of "users" is really a red herring here.
Even more ironically, most of the comments seem to indicate that sudo is a recommended solution! Are you kidding? How is that any better for admins and users? If a user wants to do something that needs more privileges, you grant him carte blanche root access? Even on OS X the access controls are this coarse. If the user is "administrative" he has full root access. The Fedora default made a lot of sense for home users but could easily be changed for other environments, though Fedora just doesn't belong in most enterprises.
What Fedora probably needs to do (maybe they have) is introduce templates for use when creating users. So you can easily create admin users, restricted users, etc. Slashdot users seem to have no complaint about the fact that you absolutely do *not* need root on OS X to install software. And even worse you can install software that's not cryptographically signed!
I doubt very much that most Fedora installs even have an administrator, or serve more than a home user. Certainly in a corporate environment Fedora isn't a good ideal simply because it has to be upgraded every year (even if you skip versions). So I find a lot of these arguments to be only valid if you're talking about a multi-user, centrally-administered system, which should not be Fedora to begin with. If you want something RedHat-ish you go with CentOS 5. If you are deploying Fedora in a corporate or educational environment, your admin is going to be hardening and locking down the installs anyway, which is something that PolicyKit finally allows you to do in a nice, fine-grained manner. Admins would want to lock down the mounting of usb flash drives, for example, to remove setuid and execute bits. When RHEL 6 is released, it will likely have much more strict default policies that would be easier to roll out to an enterprise.
Another thing is that most Fedora users I've seen install every last package on the install DVD. Yup. The whole thing. So how's that different in terms of exploit exposure from being able to yum install some-unstable-app?
So given that the most likely person to install Fedora is a home user, I don't see this policy as being a problem at all. Whether or not you have to type the root password, excited newbies are going to install every package under the sun regardless of whether it requires root or not. Further very few people seem to know much about policykit. By default you have to be logged into the console to get most privileges that policy kit allows. So just because some exploits a web app on fedora and gets some kind of shell access doesn't mean they can install rpms without root. But at that point you're hosed anyway. Remote users cannot install packages either, so even if you left this policy in place, it's not like you're at risk to remote users any more than normal.
As I am the sole user, remote or local, of my Linux machine, this is a policy that will be left on. There's no difference between me sudoing yum install blah and just doing it through the privileges of policykit. If anything this will make Fedora more accessible and acceptable to desktop users while still maintaining a certain level of unixy security. IE a virus still cannot get root without an exploit (which would still exist regardless of this policy).
Umm, no. In the original airing of this episode they did in fact leave the galaxy. And that's not the only time either. Also in "By any other Name" the Kelvins take the enterprise at "warp 11" through the barrier and into the void.
So yes, in the "canon" they have absolutely left the galaxy on two occasions. What kind of trekkie are you!:)
To drop from a higher altitude to a lower altitude you have to lose kinetic energy, not gain it. Furthermore, everything is not traveling in the same direction. There are many different orbits and junk is in all sorts of them. So some junk you'll never "net" since it's traveling in the same direction as the dejunker, and other junk is traveling exactly opposite and will slam into the net with twice the velocity of the denetter's current orbital velocity. Furthermore if the junk's orbit is 90 degrees to the dejunker, it will never be caught either. Even if the orbital paths crossed, it would probably just destroy or damage the dejunker satellite (paint fleck or rachet wrench).
So it wouldn't seem that his idea stands the common sense test (or physics for that matter). But this is just slashdot and I am not an orbital-mechanics expert. I failed that class at the starfleet academy (or was that temporal mechanics).
Definitely sounds like person who has only used a Mac on occasion. I used to think like you about it until I actually used a Mac for a while. Actually I find OS X and most OS X applications to be more keyboard-friendly than Windows. Every single command you use frequently has or can be assigned a command-something combination (or control-something). So things like open, close, print, save are always assigned the same command key sequence across all apps. That's a time saver right there. Why alt-f-s when command-s will do? While most Windows users will actually click on file->save to save their document, very few Mac users I've seen bother with clicking on the menus for most common tasks; it's all done with the keyboard.
As was said earlier in the discussion, OS X and Windows come from very different philosophies. You speak of how you want to explore the menu. On OS X that's absolutely wrong. If you have to explore the menu to find something, then someone screwed up. Deep, nested menus are considered bad on OS X. Besides, alt-something-something-something reminds me of emacs!
There are many inconsistencies in OS X that are legitimate grievances. But not being able to alt-something-something-something the menu doesn't appear to me to be that important. I'm far more frustrated on a daily basis by how OS X eats the click that focuses a window (now I use command-tab and command-` to focus windows anyway without the mouse), that you have enable keyboard navigation in dialog boxes as it's off by default, and that carbon and cocoa apps behave so differently.
Both systems have their inconsistencies, and both are getting better in this regard. And from what I can tell from using Windows 7, Windows is getting more usable and mac-like all the time.
All of which X11 has grown to support very capably, thank you very much. Unfortunately while X11 is indeed capable of supporting everything Windows 7 or OS X can do visually, tying everything together with polish is still something in which Linux distros lag behind. For example I have compiz fusion running right now with coverflow-style window switching, expose, etc, but getting the proprietary ATI driver running was a bit difficult. I had to edit grub.conf to add nopat to the kernel after installing the nice packages that I had to get from rpmfusion's repositories (not an automatic thing for Fedora 11 users). After all that I had to install the compiz-fusion extras and then modify/usr/bin/compiz-gtk to allow me to use the ccsm configurator (a UI nightmare!). Not something that is easy for people who just want their computer to work well and look nice.
On the plus side, unlike any other major non-Unix OS, it still retains incredible remote capabilities without resorting to hacks like Terminal Services. In fact, remote X11 apps can, to a point, even use 3D acceleration. The idea of having per-app display settings brings a level of flexibility that, while not that important all users, is invaluable in many places where Linux desktops are used. Cytrix had to do a lot of dark magic to implement the ability to remote individual MS Windows Apps. For folks who use remote X11 apps regularly, NX (GPL FreeNX or commercial NX) will make remote apps even faster.
You don't know what you're talking about. With the indirect rendering architecture in X11 right now, everything that Windows 7 does can or could be done with Compiz (if someone wanted to implement the effect). X11 provides the "stuff" to do all of what Window 7 does. Have you seen the ring-style switcher in compiz-fusion[1]? It uses major 3D-looking transformations. I use it daily. Kind of a clone of Apple's coverflow, but for switching windows. X11 indeed exposes "that kind of stuff." Before you spread this kind of nonsense about X11 in the future, please at least read up on the stuff.
There are indeed a lot of perceived and real issues in modern X11 desktops. Compiz helps with this as it reduces the redraws and makes things seem a lot smoother. Another common problem is that sync X11 events are asynchronous, as you resize a window, the interior widgets often lag behind in their redraw. I understand some time back there was work being done on a way to synchronize the redraws so that widgets in a window expand smoothly (like MS Windows and OS X does).
You certainly could put conditions on the sale, but only on the first sale. The doctrine of the right of first sale prohibits you from imposing conditions beyond this. If they then sold the product to a third party, your terms could not possibly have any force on the third party. You could, however, make customers sign a contract before selling them the software. Similarly book publishers make book resellers sign contracts that they will not sell a book without a cover. Hence if a lot of books cannot be sold, the bookstore rips off the covers, indicating that the lot has been "destroyed." And they are forbidden from selling these now coverless books not by law, but by contract. If I were to pull the coverless books out of the landfill, I could sell them to anyone I want without any repercussions. After all, I am not bound by that contract. The book seller might be sued for breach of contract for not properly disposing the coverless books. But they have not legal recourse against me.
Really, outside of copyright law, Apple has no special rights once they've sold a copy of the OS to you. Neither do you as a software creator have any rights when it comes to dictating how a customer uses your software within the bounds of copyright law, unless you arrange a contract with the user before the sale is completed. Many software companies that sell expensive, vertical market applications actually do this. But a EULA isn't the same thing. So while you may say that all these wannabe Mac users are whining about Apple playing dirty (they are whining and Apple is playing dirty), you are also whining. Your case simply has no grounds.
Slashdot Mirror
Wine? What does wine have to do with it? Chrome for linux is a GTK-based (for better or worse) native linux app.
I agree that Google's non-web app development record is spotty. But in fairness Google didn't write most of the apps that you're complaining about. They came from other companies as the result of purchases. Some apps, like Google Earth, were already written in Qt and thus ported easily. Other apps not so easy to port. Google only offered Picasa on Wine because there was some demand for a linux version (not enough to warrant a native port by the original company, obviously) and that was the best way to get it to linux users without having to spend a lot of money, which would have been a complete waste for Google to do. Had google written Picasa themselves, they likely would have used Qt.
Google Chrome is the one exception to all this. Google wrote it, and they really did screw up by not writing it in Qt to begin with.
How much of the ports collection is actually BSD? I bet there is a large amount of Apache, MIT, and other licenses in the mix. I know for a fact there is a large amount of GPL software in ports. The mere existence of ports is not really an argument in favour of the original poster's argument, however. The relative insignificance of the BSD family of OS's despite the court decision back in the day that freed the code, and the dominance of Linux would seem to support the conjecture that a BSD-only ecosystem would not last. Indeed it's likely only because of Linux that BSD is still healthy. Despite the fact that Apple uses a lot of BSD code in their operating system, this has not really benefited the BSDs back directly, further supporting my point. Whereas Oracle can fork a GPL'd distro and no real harm comes to the community. In fact because of the GPL'd nature of the Linux kernel, Oracle is throwing not-insignificant amounts of money at projects that will better Linux for Oracle's purpose (btrfs, etc), while at the same time benefiting the entire community. Oracle is not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. The GPL is, in fact, keeping them honest. The BSD provides much less incentive/deterant, given our current system of human nature, governance, and copyright law.
Not really. It's just a glorified vomit comet with some spectacular views. The real pioneers in commercial space flight are companies like Space-X who are very close to having launch capacity capable of being man-rated for orbital flight! We probably should cancel the Aries launch system and instead partner with Space-X.
In the meantime, Virgin Galactic or whatever it is called is just a glorified thrill ride that does nothing to advance real commercial space flight.
Sounds like you need a new smartphone. My Nokia E65 has integrated VoIP and it can, with a third-party dual-sim adapter, handle multiple SIM chips (though not both at the same time). Most of the Nokia smartphone line that runs symbian has integrated VoIP that works very well.
Yeah the "industry" would love all open source code to be BSD so they can use it with impunity. Honestly let's stop this FUD. It's simply not true. Code under the GPL is no different from code under any other license. If you don't use it in compliance with the license then you are in a copyright violation situation, and the law allows financial remedies for such a case. The fact that it is GPL is irrelevant to this. Also the summary is incorrect. Palm is in a copyright violation now and have three choices: 1. remove the GPL code, 2. license the code under a different arrangement, and 3. License their derivative product as GPL.
Why are you upset when copyright holders exercise their rights under the law to prevent a company from knowingly or unknowingly rip them off? How would BSD help this situation? Because the GPL actually has teeth we're starting to see the tip of the ice berg as far as willful license violations go. It's impossible to judge how much code is being used illegally in proprietary products. We're not talking GPL either. Any license. Microsoft code, code from some other source.
Do liberty and capitalism allow one the right to violate copyrights? The GPL exists to protect the rights and freedoms of the developers and the end users while allowing free redistribution of code. I know of no other license that does this so effectively. In my opinion, if all open source code was BSD, there really would be no open source community or ecosystem. Like Adam Smith said, sometimes you have to balance self-interest with self-interest. The BSD doesn't do that really well. Certainly there is zero incentive for a company to release code under the BSD if it's just going to be used directly against them. The GPL allows companies to foster communities and promote development, while maintaining a level playing field for all the players.
Whether or not the problem is triggered by malware or some MS update, this is still a bug that MS needs to fix. That fact that malware can hide its keys from you through this method should be impetus enough for MS to fix this in programs like regedit. Certainly fixing Windows to properly parse the shell name from the registry key is a no brainer.
Is this like "counterfeit" copies of MS Windows? Where these chips that acted and functioned the same (shadow shift production runs)? Seems like we need a better word as counterfeit implies that it looks the same but does not act the same. Maybe we should just be saying "copies produced without authorization?"
A better example is Air Transat Flight 236 where an Airbus 330 glided about 100 miles to a landing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Transat_Flight_236
Spell checker is useless I tell you. But read again... I wasn't commenting on his grammar. Nothing like a good flame war!
The problem is not that you abused the english language (though this does reduce your persuasiveness), but rather that you made an inflammatory (assertion based on emotion) statement with _nothing_ to back it up originally. Your grammar and childish language did not cause you to be modded down alone. It was your substance, or lack thereof, that got the mod. Mods do have agendas and are sometimes grammar nazis. But by and large, if you speak persuasively and logically you'll be modded up. If you're perceived to be calling someone names or making personal attacks (like "I know more about Javascript than you'll ever know"), that is not persuasive, informative, or insightful. You obviously feel deeply about the issue of Javascript and Ruby, and have responded to my posts twice, so I can tell you really do want to communicate your experience and knowledge. So this is just free, unsolicited, advice.
Also, I suppose that posting an inflammatory statement as AC also contributes a lot to a negative mod.
Anyway, enough karma burned for now.
You misread me. I never said you'd still be able to use Windows after getting a refund. Rather I was pointing out that no material goods change hands. They don't resell your license per se. They just invalidate it. Then they go on to sell XP on another machine for the full prices. So it's not like they are buying back an old license and then trying to resell it at some used market value. There is no used market involved at all.
So if the full price really is $45 today, then a refund should be just that. $45. Not $6. Depreciation has nothing to do with it.
Flawed analogy. And a very different issue. Your vehicle physically wears out, even just sitting there. Rubber gets brittle, hoses and belts crack, rust appears on all exposed metal parts. Normal use wears bearings, shafts, gears, cylinders, valves. Thus its value declines physically. Software is not like that at all. In fact, ASUS just sticks a sticker on and loads the software from a master. It's not like they take back your windows license and resell it as a "pre-owned" license. Rather they give you your $6 and then turn around and put a nice new version on a new computer and charge the full $45.
It's good to know your programming skills are orders of magnitude higher than your articulation skills. If you had mentioned these things in the first place, but dropped the childish language, you're post would likely be moderated a +5 insightful.
Truly spoken like someone who doesn't know appear to know anything about Javascript, and has never programmed anything significant in it. Or Ruby either for that matter. If you do, you should have backed up your comments with real evidence and experience rather than just a few silly expletives.
How does Ruby retain Perl's syntax but not the semantics? Sounds like you're making this up. Have you ever coded anything significant in Ruby? I don't care for Ruby's syntax either (the ability to call functions with () means you can pass functions around as parameters), but that doesn't make Ruby any less powerful as a full OOP, dynamic language.
As for Javascript, try using it for something significant sometime. Write a firefox plugin or something. Javascript is here to stay and is the mainstay of client-end user interface code. Javascript is an extremely powerful and dynamic language, akin to smalltalk in it's power and flexibility. Javascript uses a prototype-based style of OOP that takes some getting used to but is very powerful indeed. Even better Javascript has functional and lisp-like qualities to it. Javascript has its warts. Some of them are apparent if you've ever used Gnome Seed with GTK binding, from what I've read.
Despite all this I'd rather use python in the browser to script DOM objects, but ahh well. I'm also bitter that epiphany dropped Python in favor of Javascript for writing Epiphany plugins. Sigh.
Are you sure about that? Almost all farm windmills were for pumping water. Generating electricity on a small scale never really worked out. It also would never generate enough electricity for the needs of a farm yard. Not even close. So windmills disappeared from farms after the advent of pressure systems. Now that we've found ways to make wind generation of electricity actually practical they are springing up, but they are large mill on a much different scale than the mills farms used to have.
Yes this is true. But it's still coarse. You can restrict what binaries are run, yes. But what about things like controlling access to removable devices? Clearly sudo isn't enough. In fact in the long run PolicyKit will completely replace sudo. So sudo serves some good purposes, particularly in the realm of system administration. But let's not mistake it for a solution to the core problems of security on modern desktop systems.
Anyway, if you want to lock down Fedora for a user, you configure PolicyKit to disallow software installs (just in how you can designate a user in OSX to not be administrative). Personally I'm going to tweak policyKit to turn *on* installation of signed packages on my system.
How many Fedora installations actually have "users" and "admins?" The line that you don't want your users installing software just doesn't hold any water. Honestly if you have an "admin" and "users" you'll be wanting to harden the install anyway, and more than likely you will not want to use Fedora. Instead you'd do CentOS 5 or Ubuntu LTS. Most installs of Fedora are on single-user, home systems. Even in a family situation, a parent will likely want to enable parental controls anyway, so creating a limited account for the kids and using policykit to lock down what they can run (no terminal, etc), is one would do anyway. So bringing up security in the context of "users" is really a red herring here.
Even more ironically, most of the comments seem to indicate that sudo is a recommended solution! Are you kidding? How is that any better for admins and users? If a user wants to do something that needs more privileges, you grant him carte blanche root access? Even on OS X the access controls are this coarse. If the user is "administrative" he has full root access. The Fedora default made a lot of sense for home users but could easily be changed for other environments, though Fedora just doesn't belong in most enterprises.
What Fedora probably needs to do (maybe they have) is introduce templates for use when creating users. So you can easily create admin users, restricted users, etc. Slashdot users seem to have no complaint about the fact that you absolutely do *not* need root on OS X to install software. And even worse you can install software that's not cryptographically signed!
Wow the FUD flies fast and furious here.
I doubt very much that most Fedora installs even have an administrator, or serve more than a home user. Certainly in a corporate environment Fedora isn't a good ideal simply because it has to be upgraded every year (even if you skip versions). So I find a lot of these arguments to be only valid if you're talking about a multi-user, centrally-administered system, which should not be Fedora to begin with. If you want something RedHat-ish you go with CentOS 5. If you are deploying Fedora in a corporate or educational environment, your admin is going to be hardening and locking down the installs anyway, which is something that PolicyKit finally allows you to do in a nice, fine-grained manner. Admins would want to lock down the mounting of usb flash drives, for example, to remove setuid and execute bits. When RHEL 6 is released, it will likely have much more strict default policies that would be easier to roll out to an enterprise.
Another thing is that most Fedora users I've seen install every last package on the install DVD. Yup. The whole thing. So how's that different in terms of exploit exposure from being able to yum install some-unstable-app?
So given that the most likely person to install Fedora is a home user, I don't see this policy as being a problem at all. Whether or not you have to type the root password, excited newbies are going to install every package under the sun regardless of whether it requires root or not. Further very few people seem to know much about policykit. By default you have to be logged into the console to get most privileges that policy kit allows. So just because some exploits a web app on fedora and gets some kind of shell access doesn't mean they can install rpms without root. But at that point you're hosed anyway. Remote users cannot install packages either, so even if you left this policy in place, it's not like you're at risk to remote users any more than normal.
As I am the sole user, remote or local, of my Linux machine, this is a policy that will be left on. There's no difference between me sudoing yum install blah and just doing it through the privileges of policykit. If anything this will make Fedora more accessible and acceptable to desktop users while still maintaining a certain level of unixy security. IE a virus still cannot get root without an exploit (which would still exist regardless of this policy).
Umm, no. In the original airing of this episode they did in fact leave the galaxy. And that's not the only time either. Also in "By any other Name" the Kelvins take the enterprise at "warp 11" through the barrier and into the void.
So yes, in the "canon" they have absolutely left the galaxy on two occasions. What kind of trekkie are you! :)
To drop from a higher altitude to a lower altitude you have to lose kinetic energy, not gain it. Furthermore, everything is not traveling in the same direction. There are many different orbits and junk is in all sorts of them. So some junk you'll never "net" since it's traveling in the same direction as the dejunker, and other junk is traveling exactly opposite and will slam into the net with twice the velocity of the denetter's current orbital velocity. Furthermore if the junk's orbit is 90 degrees to the dejunker, it will never be caught either. Even if the orbital paths crossed, it would probably just destroy or damage the dejunker satellite (paint fleck or rachet wrench).
So it wouldn't seem that his idea stands the common sense test (or physics for that matter). But this is just slashdot and I am not an orbital-mechanics expert. I failed that class at the starfleet academy (or was that temporal mechanics).
Definitely sounds like person who has only used a Mac on occasion. I used to think like you about it until I actually used a Mac for a while. Actually I find OS X and most OS X applications to be more keyboard-friendly than Windows. Every single command you use frequently has or can be assigned a command-something combination (or control-something). So things like open, close, print, save are always assigned the same command key sequence across all apps. That's a time saver right there. Why alt-f-s when command-s will do? While most Windows users will actually click on file->save to save their document, very few Mac users I've seen bother with clicking on the menus for most common tasks; it's all done with the keyboard.
As was said earlier in the discussion, OS X and Windows come from very different philosophies. You speak of how you want to explore the menu. On OS X that's absolutely wrong. If you have to explore the menu to find something, then someone screwed up. Deep, nested menus are considered bad on OS X. Besides, alt-something-something-something reminds me of emacs!
There are many inconsistencies in OS X that are legitimate grievances. But not being able to alt-something-something-something the menu doesn't appear to me to be that important. I'm far more frustrated on a daily basis by how OS X eats the click that focuses a window (now I use command-tab and command-` to focus windows anyway without the mouse), that you have enable keyboard navigation in dialog boxes as it's off by default, and that carbon and cocoa apps behave so differently.
Both systems have their inconsistencies, and both are getting better in this regard. And from what I can tell from using Windows 7, Windows is getting more usable and mac-like all the time.
All of which X11 has grown to support very capably, thank you very much. Unfortunately while X11 is indeed capable of supporting everything Windows 7 or OS X can do visually, tying everything together with polish is still something in which Linux distros lag behind. For example I have compiz fusion running right now with coverflow-style window switching, expose, etc, but getting the proprietary ATI driver running was a bit difficult. I had to edit grub.conf to add nopat to the kernel after installing the nice packages that I had to get from rpmfusion's repositories (not an automatic thing for Fedora 11 users). After all that I had to install the compiz-fusion extras and then modify /usr/bin/compiz-gtk to allow me to use the ccsm configurator (a UI nightmare!). Not something that is easy for people who just want their computer to work well and look nice.
On the plus side, unlike any other major non-Unix OS, it still retains incredible remote capabilities without resorting to hacks like Terminal Services. In fact, remote X11 apps can, to a point, even use 3D acceleration. The idea of having per-app display settings brings a level of flexibility that, while not that important all users, is invaluable in many places where Linux desktops are used. Cytrix had to do a lot of dark magic to implement the ability to remote individual MS Windows Apps. For folks who use remote X11 apps regularly, NX (GPL FreeNX or commercial NX) will make remote apps even faster.
You don't know what you're talking about. With the indirect rendering architecture in X11 right now, everything that Windows 7 does can or could be done with Compiz (if someone wanted to implement the effect). X11 provides the "stuff" to do all of what Window 7 does. Have you seen the ring-style switcher in compiz-fusion[1]? It uses major 3D-looking transformations. I use it daily. Kind of a clone of Apple's coverflow, but for switching windows. X11 indeed exposes "that kind of stuff." Before you spread this kind of nonsense about X11 in the future, please at least read up on the stuff.
There are indeed a lot of perceived and real issues in modern X11 desktops. Compiz helps with this as it reduces the redraws and makes things seem a lot smoother. Another common problem is that sync X11 events are asynchronous, as you resize a window, the interior widgets often lag behind in their redraw. I understand some time back there was work being done on a way to synchronize the redraws so that widgets in a window expand smoothly (like MS Windows and OS X does).
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEUf8BQB-YA
No you don't have any special "rights."
You certainly could put conditions on the sale, but only on the first sale. The doctrine of the right of first sale prohibits you from imposing conditions beyond this. If they then sold the product to a third party, your terms could not possibly have any force on the third party. You could, however, make customers sign a contract before selling them the software. Similarly book publishers make book resellers sign contracts that they will not sell a book without a cover. Hence if a lot of books cannot be sold, the bookstore rips off the covers, indicating that the lot has been "destroyed." And they are forbidden from selling these now coverless books not by law, but by contract. If I were to pull the coverless books out of the landfill, I could sell them to anyone I want without any repercussions. After all, I am not bound by that contract. The book seller might be sued for breach of contract for not properly disposing the coverless books. But they have not legal recourse against me.
Really, outside of copyright law, Apple has no special rights once they've sold a copy of the OS to you. Neither do you as a software creator have any rights when it comes to dictating how a customer uses your software within the bounds of copyright law, unless you arrange a contract with the user before the sale is completed. Many software companies that sell expensive, vertical market applications actually do this. But a EULA isn't the same thing. So while you may say that all these wannabe Mac users are whining about Apple playing dirty (they are whining and Apple is playing dirty), you are also whining. Your case simply has no grounds.