The mozilla "click-to-play flash" add-on will probably prevent this from running. If this doesn't use flash, then it would have to install some other player which the user could just cancel (no no such opportunity was presented, then that would be legally questionable). Of course such a player wouldn't even be available on unix, so we wouldn't even see it.
Either way, ad blocking is here to stay and I highly doubt that these ads will remain unblocked for long. In fact I'm looking forward to them. It lets me practice my regular expression skills in privoxy!
Sites that don't let me in without forcing me to see an ad I just don't need to go to. Why don't these people learn from google's plaintext advertising experience. You don't need large, obnoxious ads to get people to buy your stuff.
Having 96 kHz sampling isn't about recording pitches above 22 kHz; it's about getting a better, smoother approximation of the sound waves. With 44 kHz sampling, a 22kHz sound wave is very discrete and choppy. Good ears would almost certainly detect this. At 96 kHz sampling, that same sound wave could be more accurately sampled, allowing for the natural rise and fall of the wave form, rather than just the on/off that you'd get with only 22 kHz sampling rate.
The thing is that we'd be spending billions on our own economy. This pays off greatly in terms of jobs and technological advancement. It's not like all this money ends up in space. An earlier slashdot posting mentioned that the estimated return on investment of the moon shots was about 9 dollars in the economy for every dollar spent on the program. People seem to forget that what makes our economy strong is actually perception and activity. Oddly enough, this is often used as an excuse to run budget deficits (fiscal policy). While any extreme is bad, extreme stinginess and an unwillingness to spend money (even money we don't think we have) actually slows the economy down, which is one of the reaons for our present slump.
I'm also astounded by the negativism and pessimism by the majority of slashdotters. If we're to go forward and make any progress as society, we have to seriously adjust our attitudes. If we aren't ambitious, then we will stagnate as a society, and all of the social ills that we see around us will get worse, not better, as a result.
These days I don't buy anything but Hi-Tec hikers. They are super-comfortable and have no metal that I know of in them. They current manufacture a lot of boots for swat teams around the country and the military. They are sometimes hard to find in stores, but they are out there. Their biggest claims to fame are comfort and weight. They are the lightest boots you can buy, yet they seem to last pretty long, even when you're on your feet all day. The only downside is that if you find a pair you really like, buy 2 pairs; they never manufacture a certain style more than once. Also, nowadays, shoes do *not* need to broken in, generally (at least from the comfort point of view). If a shoe is not immediately comfortable, it never will be. I've found Hi-Tec's to be this way.
Sigh. No, replacing X11 with a framebuffer is not a good idea. OS X quartz is not a framebuffer interface and neither is the Win32 gdi. Go see www.freedesktop.org and see how X11 is coming kicking and screaming into the 21st century, doing things we never thought possible, all within the X11 framework, which is really showing remarkable durability. Within the year, X11 will have a compositing manager as powerful as quartz's compositing server and possibly even more flexible and powerful. And very fast too. The interesting thing about Keith Packards work with double-buffering windows is that the apparent speed of the screen drawing apears to be much faster than without the special effects.
And you can pry my network transparency from my cold dead hands.
Exactly. Having tab completion has become essential for me. I can drill down to a file or folder far faster with tab completion than any other scheme (although ms's dropdown completions aren't bad). The OS X file selector certainly is simple and usable and hard to mess up, but it's significantly slower to use than the current gtk file dialog box. The fun thing is that tab-completion currently allows the current gtk dialog box to have the equivalent of simple bookmarks (~ tab to go home), and filters (*.jpg tab). I also love it (as was said in the parent post) how the file selector reduces the file list right down to just the files that match the current tab-completion pattern. It's like vi. Once you get to know it, it's very efficent and very fast. I think that the efficiency of the current widget is the reason it has taken them so long to come up with a replacement. Does the KDE selector still emulate windows and use that horrid method of a horizonally scrolling file list window?
Then this 'Pepsi' thing... Looks like I'm gonna drink Pepsi instead of Coke soon. And I mean a lot of Pepsi. Definitely a good idea for Pepsi.
Well if there's a 1 in 3 chance of winning, you'll end up spending an average of $1.50 to $3 per song, if you take price per bottle of $.50-$1. If you want music, just save your money (and your stomach) and buy the songs directly from iTMS. Also, seeing as the utility that you can get from a bottle of pepsi is pretty insignificant (perhaps even negative) compared to the utility of owning a song, you're far better off avoiding falling for the marketing of pepsi. Just support Apple directly and buy songs for the price of.99 cents directly versus the $1.5 to $3.0 through pepsi.
The space elevator can only ever get things to geosynchronous orbit, which would help the moon shot here. However, for other things like the space station or any low-earth orbit stuff, the space elevator wouldn't be that helpful. Although it could take the stuff up to geosynchronous orbit (gaining angular velocity as it climbs) and then drop from that orbit to a lower orbit. The fun thing about a space elevator is if you jumped out at 300 miles above the earth, you'd fall straight down to earth because you have no orbital velocity at that point. But I think if things continue to progress, and barring any huge civilization-shattering calamity, we will see a space elevator some day. Of course, don't tell Donald Rumsfeld about the terrorists in the book, "Red Mars" that figure out a way to destroy the counter-weight on the elevator, causing it to fall and crash into the planet, wrapping itself around mars almost 3 times.
That's why things like binary package managers exist. Even on windows, things like this can be hairy. Granted it's probably easier to find a windows binary. But on Debian, Redhat, Fedora Core, Yellow Dog, or Gentoo, apt-get install gaim or yum install gaim or emerge gaim work well, and work as fast as your connect is (except gentoo, but even that's pretty quick).
Your build problems can't be used to as an idicator of general wasted computer time, as much as I feel you pain. However, it still wasted your time. But that could have been mitigated had you either used the binaries, or perhaps checked with other users of the same distro to discover potential problems.
Having said all that, all OS's waste time to a certain degree, some more than others. Careful planning and use can reduce that, even on Windows, to the bare amount of time needed. I've found as others have found that OS X is indeed cool and stable and just works. However, for me it is no better than windows in that there's practically nothing to tweak. Many of us thrive on that kind of thing (not fixing, but breaking and then fixing). For us, Linux and BSDs will always be infinitely more fun, but not necessarily more time conservative, but the time wasting is from completely different sources. And there are masochists out there who love to reinstall windows every month.
Nonsense. Look at a lot of professional Windows apps (almost all games), they draw their own widgets. People want applications to look pretty, but not necessarily the same.
That is completely true, although the results aren't always that pretty. Norton Antivirus (consumer edition), for example, has a custom widget set not used by any other software vendor that I know of. Does it work? Yes. Is it pretty? Well, not in this case.
Microsoft Office is the best example of custom-guis, though. Every version since 97 has had a new widget set. Sometimes the things they do end up as standard windows widgets in the next release of windows.
But the fact remains that despite what the usability experts tell us, the industry trend (which very well could have been started by the unix desktops) is to do custom widget sets and themeable interfaces. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing
I do think that theme-level integration (when running gnome apps in kde, or kde apps in gnome) is a very good thing. Already we have the gtk-wimp theme which does use Windows widgets to help give gtk apps an almost native appearance under windows and this is also a good thing.
Just use dosemu under linux, booting freedos to make a boot disk from the manufacturer's files and instructions. Then boot on the freedos-based boot disk. Simple and you can set it up from within Linux. An alternative to dosemu (which can be a beast) is dosbox which is a dos emulator that runs on any platform and can be used to make boot disks. Although it runs it's own version of DOS, it can be made to make freedos boot disks.
I also have been very surprised that bios manufacturers haven't been using freedos, especially now that Windows 98 is falling out of vogue.
Only the default configurations are stored in the app folder in OSX. Per-user configuration is stored in $HOME/Library/Preferences. I'd really hate to see a system which stores user prefs with the app... for starters, that means you already have crap for filesystem-level security (since it needs world-writeable access to the app folder) and then also, then if you uninstall an app then reinstall it later you'd have to recover your settings.
Yeah that is true. This is also how gconf works, and this is really how I meant to say longhorn should work. In some ways it's naturally distributed (when apps are installed, they install a schema). Apple did get it right and it's good to see gconf doing the same things.
The only thing I don't like about the plist format is that it's one of those XML formats which is XML in syntax but not in "spirit." It uses order to perform the key-data pairing rather than structure, and it's rather ugly and uses tags with cdata instead of tags with attributes (it does something like FooBar instead of just doing something like Bar). But it still gets the job done.
That's always the danger of widespread XML. Almost XML-abuse, and I expect to see Microsoft widely use XML improperly by making the data binary
Gnome, stop trying to be another microsoft. Don't walk down the same road. Some of us don't want binary format registry file configuration files that can't be edited by hand.
I'm surprised how often this comes up. gconf is not binary only; it has a hiearchy and looks like the window registry, but it's stored in xml and you can edit it with vi! Each node in gconf is stored in it's own file (think equivalent to the dot file). Lets drop this little complaint here and how. It's simply not true. The registry in theory isn't a bad idea, either. It was just so poorly done in Windows that MS is dropping it completely in Longhorn. I think it will be replaced with a more distributed, meta-registry approach, which is actually what gconf already does. Hopefully that will mean each registry entry will be contained within the app folder itself in Longhorn (a la OS X).
It's not transparent windows per se that we are looking for. It's the ability to have completely smooth, shaped edges and better anti-aliased text. It's also amazing what a little candy like a real drop shadow does to the UI. It helps your eye see the edges of ui elements better. On OS X, for example, many windows have no frame around them at all. But they still look like a window because of the light shadow that is drawn underneath it. This allows two completely white rectangles to be stacked on top of eachother and still look like separate windows.
True transparency will also help in drawing icons without resorting to the current nasty hack of having to grab the background pixmap and then blend the png into it.
Essentially translucency (true alpha-channel support) in the x server is a great boon to us all, especially those into art and drawing, but also just those of us that want a desktop with no more jaggies.
Finally, this support for alpha channel and window compositing actually makes the gui appear much faster, because redraws are virtually eliminated. If you want to go back to the old Windows 3.1 (or even GEM) interface of low-color, jagged edges, go ahead. I'll save my eyes.
I'm a user and I want KDE. Most people agree that KDE is more mature and robust than GNOME anyway, so from a business point of view it is obviously better suited. KDE also has more stability from other points of view, for example it doesn't change the default window manager for each major release, the groupware and the kiosk mode are very important as well. I'm not talking down on GNOME here, but KDE is more mature and all the major business wins Linux has had so far were with (and because of) KDE
Yes but you can't develop proprietary apps (for good or bad) using KDE without paying the trolltech licensing fee.
nd if we accept the argument, we would clearly choose the platform with the more robust administration interface, which clearly is KDE. kcontrol is integrated and pretty much all-encompassing, while GNOME is constantly shifting from CORBA over XML to a binary registry and back. GNOME has become so bad that they actually added a regedit style "config editor" and apparently really expect users to use it to configure applications. Hint: This is the kind of nightmare people want to get rid of when they switch from Windows to Linux.
Actually the gconf configuration system is what the registry should have been. It's not really binary at all. Instead it's a distributed hiarchy of xml entries (using the file system to provide for folders and the tree structure). It works very well and you can edit it with vi. gconf-editor is there, and it works, but it's still plain xml text and probably will remain so. As for inter-process communication, KDE and GNOME are converging on the same mechanism (I think it has something to do with DBUS) that is probably rpc via xml, as defined in the freedesktop specs.
I find your comments on gnome show a bit of ignorance as to what really goes on in with gnome. Gnome is quite a bit better designed than you think. Whether or not it's better than KDE isn't the issue here. The main issue is providing an environment that lends itself to development needs of businesses (the LGPL actually does us a favor here). The user aspect of that is another story. All businesses have a few proprietary inhouse software packages that they would want to port with the minimal effort and expense (and licensing is part of that).
All that said, KDE is a wonderful interface. I am constantly driven nuts, though, but the insistance on using the backwards Microsoft way of placing buttons in dialogs. Apple got that one right.
Spammers are already in the arms of organized crime. Using viruses to take over home computers and turn them into zombies. That and theft of service (for stealing my bandwidth) pushes them into the realm of crime. Crime is prohibited. We seek to punish crimes as often was we discover them. Is this different? I don't believe that using laws to control spammers is the equivalent of alchohol prohivition. It certainly isn't the same as using the DMCA to give companies artificial rights and punish users. On the other hand, in a global society, our laws don't do much to stop others. I think we do need a technical solution, however.
I've often wondered lately, why Linux? Why didn't FreeBSD or OpenBSD take off the way Linux did and get the kind of corporate interest and deployment that Linux enjoys? The answer is interesting.
Althought it is true that a "UserBSD" or any BSD could be a very good product, having the same features in every way as Linux, BSD will never have the same success as Linux is having. There never will be any large traditional corporate sponsers of BSD. Why? The reason is the GPL. Although many proclaim the BSD license as a more liberal license, and one that is business friendly, companies that contribute to Linux, such as IBM or Novell will not touch it.
From a business standpoint, contributing to a BSD-licensed project makes no economic sense. To do so would be tantamount to subsidizing your competitors, such as Microsoft. Linux, on the other hand, is licensed under the GPL. IBM and Novell can contribute greatly to it, in order to build themselves a better platform to support their business. Any improvements they submit to the community benefit everyone, but no one can take their contribution and use it for their own proprietary projects. So the GPL makes it so that what's good for IBM is good for all, but that any benefit that others get from using IBM's code also comes back to benefit IBM again. Thus the playing field is leveled and fair. IBM actually gets the spirit of the GPL whereas SCO just does not.
Anyway, regardless of the technical merit of using BSD as a platform for a User distribution, because of the BSD license, there will never be the corporate backing needed to really ensure the rapid development needed to support an initiative such as UserBSD.
I am always wary of corporate dependence, but I feel that companies that work within the letter and spirit of the open source licenses are a great benefit to all, while they themselves can benefit. And this benefits projects like UserLinux.
Imagine my lack of surprise at a Mormon bothering people at home trying to sell them something. Yes, nothing like putting old skills to new use...
Except that Mormons don't typically sell things. I can also tell you that Mormons' would far rather talk to people who desire to know more about what they have to say than the person cold-called behind the average door. Occasionally they do find someone who is genuinely interested from a cold call. But the majority of their success comes from people who ask for them to visit them. (In my experience.)
I can also assure you that the "Flo Fox" woman definitely is not a Mormon. The Ardie Brackett woman does appear to be a Mormon, though.
Oh come on people. Every time China comes up with a technology iniative, we in the west cry foul, as if somehow we have the god-given right to define standards and technologies that all the world must use. Hate to break it to you all, but China has a lot more people than we do, and sometime in the near future we'll be the ones who are trying to make our protocols compatible with theirs, not the other way around. China has some of the most brilliant people in the world. They are really good and inventing, borrowing, and stealing ideas, and unlike us, they aren't restricted to the Microsoft world.
If you are paranoid about protocols enabling easier censoring and oppression, what do you think corporations and government would love to do over here? It's fine to say you don't trust China's protocols to protect you, but you can't trust any of the things coming out of here, such as "trusted" computing, Palladium, etc, either. From China's point of view, especially, they no longer wish to pay us for our ability to conduct espionage against them.
Software firewalls suck, for two main reasons 1. they're only as strong as the operating system they run on... if this is windows, then you're screwed
How true. However, nowadays, all "hardware" firewalls do run some sort of OS, though, and many run linux-based OS's.
2. you're computer still has to do all the blocking, the point of the firewall is to block unwanted traffic before it makes it to your network
Actually this is not true. Your homemade firewall is like any other hardware firewall. It stands between your network and your outside line. Firewall's of this nature by definition have at least 2 interfaces: one for outside, one for inside trusted network. So no, firewalling doesn't allow traffic into your network before blocking it; the firewall stops traffic at the door.
If you read the web page and try out the driver you'll find it does exactly this. It uses code from the ntfs project (libntfs) to grab the ntfs.sys file and copy it over to use it. Therefore no distribution of microsoft binaries is needed. If it can't find the driver on your hard drive, it can download it from microsoft.com from xp sp1 (which has some interesting legal implications).
Performance would not be anywhere near the performance of a native linux file system (either ntfs or ext3) since it uses the lufs kernel module to communicate via a unix socket with the user-land ntfs hack. So you wouldn't want to use it as your root file system or anything. But for accessing mp3s, changing the Windows administrator password, or other similar operations, this seems to work ok. Heck, even just reading and writing MS Word doc files would be fast enough to not really be noticable to a user.
Slashdot Mirror
The mozilla "click-to-play flash" add-on will probably prevent this from running. If this doesn't use flash, then it would have to install some other player which the user could just cancel (no no such opportunity was presented, then that would be legally questionable). Of course such a player wouldn't even be available on unix, so we wouldn't even see it.
Either way, ad blocking is here to stay and I highly doubt that these ads will remain unblocked for long. In fact I'm looking forward to them. It lets me practice my regular expression skills in privoxy!
Sites that don't let me in without forcing me to see an ad I just don't need to go to. Why don't these people learn from google's plaintext advertising experience. You don't need large, obnoxious ads to get people to buy your stuff.
Having 96 kHz sampling isn't about recording pitches above 22 kHz; it's about getting a better, smoother approximation of the sound waves. With 44 kHz sampling, a 22kHz sound wave is very discrete and choppy. Good ears would almost certainly detect this. At 96 kHz sampling, that same sound wave could be more accurately sampled, allowing for the natural rise and fall of the wave form, rather than just the on/off that you'd get with only 22 kHz sampling rate.
The thing is that we'd be spending billions on our own economy. This pays off greatly in terms of jobs and technological advancement. It's not like all this money ends up in space. An earlier slashdot posting mentioned that the estimated return on investment of the moon shots was about 9 dollars in the economy for every dollar spent on the program. People seem to forget that what makes our economy strong is actually perception and activity. Oddly enough, this is often used as an excuse to run budget deficits (fiscal policy). While any extreme is bad, extreme stinginess and an unwillingness to spend money (even money we don't think we have) actually slows the economy down, which is one of the reaons for our present slump.
I'm also astounded by the negativism and pessimism by the majority of slashdotters. If we're to go forward and make any progress as society, we have to seriously adjust our attitudes. If we aren't ambitious, then we will stagnate as a society, and all of the social ills that we see around us will get worse, not better, as a result.
These days I don't buy anything but Hi-Tec hikers. They are super-comfortable and have no metal that I know of in them. They current manufacture a lot of boots for swat teams around the country and the military. They are sometimes hard to find in stores, but they are out there. Their biggest claims to fame are comfort and weight. They are the lightest boots you can buy, yet they seem to last pretty long, even when you're on your feet all day. The only downside is that if you find a pair you really like, buy 2 pairs; they never manufacture a certain style more than once. Also, nowadays, shoes do *not* need to broken in, generally (at least from the comfort point of view). If a shoe is not immediately comfortable, it never will be. I've found Hi-Tec's to be this way.
See above posts on the dosbox project. Dosemu is x86 linux only, but dosbox can run on any platform.
Just browse with a filter on the comments of +2 and you'll find the comments are pretty good. All the crap gets moderated down.
Sigh. No, replacing X11 with a framebuffer is not a good idea. OS X quartz is not a framebuffer interface and neither is the Win32 gdi. Go see www.freedesktop.org and see how X11 is coming kicking and screaming into the 21st century, doing things we never thought possible, all within the X11 framework, which is really showing remarkable durability. Within the year, X11 will have a compositing manager as powerful as quartz's compositing server and possibly even more flexible and powerful. And very fast too. The interesting thing about Keith Packards work with double-buffering windows is that the apparent speed of the screen drawing apears to be much faster than without the special effects.
And you can pry my network transparency from my cold dead hands.
Exactly. Having tab completion has become essential for me. I can drill down to a file or folder far faster with tab completion than any other scheme (although ms's dropdown completions aren't bad). The OS X file selector certainly is simple and usable and hard to mess up, but it's significantly slower to use than the current gtk file dialog box. The fun thing is that tab-completion currently allows the current gtk dialog box to have the equivalent of simple bookmarks (~ tab to go home), and filters (*.jpg tab). I also love it (as was said in the parent post) how the file selector reduces the file list right down to just the files that match the current tab-completion pattern. It's like vi. Once you get to know it, it's very efficent and very fast. I think that the efficiency of the current widget is the reason it has taken them so long to come up with a replacement. Does the KDE selector still emulate windows and use that horrid method of a horizonally scrolling file list window?
The space elevator can only ever get things to geosynchronous orbit, which would help the moon shot here. However, for other things like the space station or any low-earth orbit stuff, the space elevator wouldn't be that helpful. Although it could take the stuff up to geosynchronous orbit (gaining angular velocity as it climbs) and then drop from that orbit to a lower orbit. The fun thing about a space elevator is if you jumped out at 300 miles above the earth, you'd fall straight down to earth because you have no orbital velocity at that point. But I think if things continue to progress, and barring any huge civilization-shattering calamity, we will see a space elevator some day. Of course, don't tell Donald Rumsfeld about the terrorists in the book, "Red Mars" that figure out a way to destroy the counter-weight on the elevator, causing it to fall and crash into the planet, wrapping itself around mars almost 3 times.
That's why things like binary package managers exist. Even on windows, things like this can be hairy. Granted it's probably easier to find a windows binary. But on Debian, Redhat, Fedora Core, Yellow Dog, or Gentoo, apt-get install gaim or yum install gaim or emerge gaim work well, and work as fast as your connect is (except gentoo, but even that's pretty quick).
Your build problems can't be used to as an idicator of general wasted computer time, as much as I feel you pain. However, it still wasted your time. But that could have been mitigated had you either used the binaries, or perhaps checked with other users of the same distro to discover potential problems.
Having said all that, all OS's waste time to a certain degree, some more than others. Careful planning and use can reduce that, even on Windows, to the bare amount of time needed. I've found as others have found that OS X is indeed cool and stable and just works. However, for me it is no better than windows in that there's practically nothing to tweak. Many of us thrive on that kind of thing (not fixing, but breaking and then fixing). For us, Linux and BSDs will always be infinitely more fun, but not necessarily more time conservative, but the time wasting is from completely different sources. And there are masochists out there who love to reinstall windows every month.
That is completely true, although the results aren't always that pretty. Norton Antivirus (consumer edition), for example, has a custom widget set not used by any other software vendor that I know of. Does it work? Yes. Is it pretty? Well, not in this case.
Microsoft Office is the best example of custom-guis, though. Every version since 97 has had a new widget set. Sometimes the things they do end up as standard windows widgets in the next release of windows.
But the fact remains that despite what the usability experts tell us, the industry trend (which very well could have been started by the unix desktops) is to do custom widget sets and themeable interfaces. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing
I do think that theme-level integration (when running gnome apps in kde, or kde apps in gnome) is a very good thing. Already we have the gtk-wimp theme which does use Windows widgets to help give gtk apps an almost native appearance under windows and this is also a good thing.
Just use dosemu under linux, booting freedos to make a boot disk from the manufacturer's files and instructions. Then boot on the freedos-based boot disk. Simple and you can set it up from within Linux. An alternative to dosemu (which can be a beast) is dosbox which is a dos emulator that runs on any platform and can be used to make boot disks. Although it runs it's own version of DOS, it can be made to make freedos boot disks.
I also have been very surprised that bios manufacturers haven't been using freedos, especially now that Windows 98 is falling out of vogue.
That's always the danger of widespread XML. Almost XML-abuse, and I expect to see Microsoft widely use XML improperly by making the data binary
It's not transparent windows per se that we are looking for. It's the ability to have completely smooth, shaped edges and better anti-aliased text. It's also amazing what a little candy like a real drop shadow does to the UI. It helps your eye see the edges of ui elements better. On OS X, for example, many windows have no frame around them at all. But they still look like a window because of the light shadow that is drawn underneath it. This allows two completely white rectangles to be stacked on top of eachother and still look like separate windows.
True transparency will also help in drawing icons without resorting to the current nasty hack of having to grab the background pixmap and then blend the png into it.
Essentially translucency (true alpha-channel support) in the x server is a great boon to us all, especially those into art and drawing, but also just those of us that want a desktop with no more jaggies.
Finally, this support for alpha channel and window compositing actually makes the gui appear much faster, because redraws are virtually eliminated. If you want to go back to the old Windows 3.1 (or even GEM) interface of low-color, jagged edges, go ahead. I'll save my eyes.
Actually the gconf configuration system is what the registry should have been. It's not really binary at all. Instead it's a distributed hiarchy of xml entries (using the file system to provide for folders and the tree structure). It works very well and you can edit it with vi. gconf-editor is there, and it works, but it's still plain xml text and probably will remain so. As for inter-process communication, KDE and GNOME are converging on the same mechanism (I think it has something to do with DBUS) that is probably rpc via xml, as defined in the freedesktop specs.
I find your comments on gnome show a bit of ignorance as to what really goes on in with gnome. Gnome is quite a bit better designed than you think. Whether or not it's better than KDE isn't the issue here. The main issue is providing an environment that lends itself to development needs of businesses (the LGPL actually does us a favor here). The user aspect of that is another story. All businesses have a few proprietary inhouse software packages that they would want to port with the minimal effort and expense (and licensing is part of that).
All that said, KDE is a wonderful interface. I am constantly driven nuts, though, but the insistance on using the backwards Microsoft way of placing buttons in dialogs. Apple got that one right.
Spammers are already in the arms of organized crime. Using viruses to take over home computers and turn them into zombies. That and theft of service (for stealing my bandwidth) pushes them into the realm of crime. Crime is prohibited. We seek to punish crimes as often was we discover them. Is this different? I don't believe that using laws to control spammers is the equivalent of alchohol prohivition. It certainly isn't the same as using the DMCA to give companies artificial rights and punish users. On the other hand, in a global society, our laws don't do much to stop others. I think we do need a technical solution, however.
Michael
This is hardly a funny comment. It is completely serious. Where are the metamoderators when you need them.
I've often wondered lately, why Linux? Why didn't FreeBSD or OpenBSD take off the way Linux did and get the kind of corporate interest and deployment that Linux enjoys? The answer is interesting.
Althought it is true that a "UserBSD" or any BSD could be a very good product, having the same features in every way as Linux, BSD will never have the same success as Linux is having. There never will be any large traditional corporate sponsers of BSD. Why? The reason is the GPL. Although many proclaim the BSD license as a more liberal license, and one that is business friendly, companies that contribute to Linux, such as IBM or Novell will not touch it.
From a business standpoint, contributing to a BSD-licensed project makes no economic sense. To do so would be tantamount to subsidizing your competitors, such as Microsoft. Linux, on the other hand, is licensed under the GPL. IBM and Novell can contribute greatly to it, in order to build themselves a better platform to support their business. Any improvements they submit to the community benefit everyone, but no one can take their contribution and use it for their own proprietary projects. So the GPL makes it so that what's good for IBM is good for all, but that any benefit that others get from using IBM's code also comes back to benefit IBM again. Thus the playing field is leveled and fair. IBM actually gets the spirit of the GPL whereas SCO just does not.
Anyway, regardless of the technical merit of using BSD as a platform for a User distribution, because of the BSD license, there will never be the corporate backing needed to really ensure the rapid development needed to support an initiative such as UserBSD.
I am always wary of corporate dependence, but I feel that companies that work within the letter and spirit of the open source licenses are a great benefit to all, while they themselves can benefit. And this benefits projects like UserLinux.
Except that Mormons don't typically sell things. I can also tell you that Mormons' would far rather talk to people who desire to know more about what they have to say than the person cold-called behind the average door. Occasionally they do find someone who is genuinely interested from a cold call. But the majority of their success comes from people who ask for them to visit them. (In my experience.)
I can also assure you that the "Flo Fox" woman definitely is not a Mormon. The Ardie Brackett woman does appear to be a Mormon, though.
Oh come on people. Every time China comes up with a technology iniative, we in the west cry foul, as if somehow we have the god-given right to define standards and technologies that all the world must use. Hate to break it to you all, but China has a lot more people than we do, and sometime in the near future we'll be the ones who are trying to make our protocols compatible with theirs, not the other way around. China has some of the most brilliant people in the world. They are really good and inventing, borrowing, and stealing ideas, and unlike us, they aren't restricted to the Microsoft world.
If you are paranoid about protocols enabling easier censoring and oppression, what do you think corporations and government would love to do over here? It's fine to say you don't trust China's protocols to protect you, but you can't trust any of the things coming out of here, such as "trusted" computing, Palladium, etc, either. From China's point of view, especially, they no longer wish to pay us for our ability to conduct espionage against them.
Actually this is not true. Your homemade firewall is like any other hardware firewall. It stands between your network and your outside line. Firewall's of this nature by definition have at least 2 interfaces: one for outside, one for inside trusted network. So no, firewalling doesn't allow traffic into your network before blocking it; the firewall stops traffic at the door.
If you read the web page and try out the driver you'll find it does exactly this. It uses code from the ntfs project (libntfs) to grab the ntfs.sys file and copy it over to use it. Therefore no distribution of microsoft binaries is needed. If it can't find the driver on your hard drive, it can download it from microsoft.com from xp sp1 (which has some interesting legal implications).
Performance would not be anywhere near the performance of a native linux file system (either ntfs or ext3) since it uses the lufs kernel module to communicate via a unix socket with the user-land ntfs hack. So you wouldn't want to use it as your root file system or anything. But for accessing mp3s, changing the Windows administrator password, or other similar operations, this seems to work ok. Heck, even just reading and writing MS Word doc files would be fast enough to not really be noticable to a user.