>Some have argued that KOffice merely duplicates
>Microsoft's efforts, but that is not true: Unlike
>MS Word, KWord uses a very simple and efficient
>frame concept, which makes it quite easy to
>create complex layouts. For example I was able to
>create a letter layout with two columns in a
>couple of minutes with no prior knowledge of the
>program.
>
>You just draw frames where you want to have text
>and type in them (if you use frames, you can also
>use KWord without them like a normal word
>processor). You can connect frames so that text
>flows between them, and they are automatically
>extended to subsequent pages.
That's a great innovation on the side of KWord, It's much more efficient, because in Word you have to cope with drawing text fields where you want to have text and then type in them. Word also confuses you with ability to connect those text fields so that text flows between then.
I'm not a kernel hacker, though... I just applied them and resolved rejects by hand. They _do_ seem to work on kernel 2.4.13, I tested that with serpent encryption of a filesystem on a loopback device.
> I would guess that the only time that
> transparent windows help is if you have an OS/wm
> that does not offer workspaces or similar.
What about antialiasing? Suppose you have a window of irregular (non-rectangular) shape, You don't want its edges to appear jaggy, and can't predict the color of the background (not to mention background images/wallpapers, lower windows etc.).
The only way to achieve proper anti-aliased edges would be to use semi-transparent pixels at the edges.
And of course we can imagine windows which use transparent areas as a part of their design.
Have you seen various skins to the K-jofol audio player? I'm sure their authors would love to put their hands on an alpha-channel capable windowing system...
>I was happy to see alternative to napster, but I was
>REALLY angry at the fact that people are installing
>spying crap on my system not EVEN with small notices
>anywhere in the install or download process!
What, are you crazy or something? If there were notices you probably wouldn't install that software, would you?
This is an essential feature Mozilla Mail should have - S/MIME support.
It's a widely accepted standard for digital signatures and encryption of mail messages an PKI (Public Key Infrastructure).
>A tool like this, if widespread, could effectively
>contain future buffer-overrun type attacks.
Unless, of course, there were buffer overruns in UrlScan itself (which isn't that improbable considering buffer overruns in the "Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server":-))
Security holes happen in security products too.
Yes, in Mozilla yopu can store passwords, but in the world of network computing you won't use a single machine from which you access services, one machine where your passwods can be stored. You'll likely connect from your palmtop, your office terminal, your toaster/refrigerator etc.
So unfortunately this has to be a central authentication entity.
>We just don't have that great a motivation to improve processor
>technology these days. We have processor technology that is beyond the
>dreams of engineers 30 years ago. For the most part, we have reached a
>point where most of the needs of applications of massively powerful
>computing are currently realized in today's machines.
Ha! Just wait till Quake 4 hits the shelves, we'll see what you'll be saying then!
Seriously, current computing power is FAR below what is needed for realistic simulation of reality. When you look at CGI in the movies nowadays, and you've got a good eye, you'll see it still 'feels' artificial, though they used multi-computer render-farms for them, and computations took months. And that's only flat 2D projection of a 3D scene, in a resolution (about 8000X8000 pixels) that's much less than what single human eye can achieve, and sound is still digitized from natural sources, and they don't do all the simultaion of physics - much of that is pre-directed, 'hand'-animated, and all the logic of the scene is a human's work (computers didn't process the 'what if a ship hits an iceberg' rules when they were making Titanic!)
No, today's machines are far from realizing the need for computing power. Not only in VR uses. What about scientific processing of data? Would SETI exist if we didn't need much more processing power than we have now? What about intuitive user interfaces? I saw Nautilus from my new Mandrake 8.0 _crawl_ on my PIII 550, 256 Mb RAM just yesterday.
What about Mozilla/Netscape and other browsers?
on
Web Bug Detector
·
· Score: 1
Do they plan to release plugins for other browsers? No word about that in their faq...
Additional info:
For win32, builds with talkback are the ones named mozilla-win32-talkback.zip. You just unzip them and bun bin/mozilla.exe.
For Linux, builds with talkback are the ones named mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gny-sea.tar.gz. You un-targz them, then run mozilla-installer/mozilla-installer. To get talkback, you must choose the component named 'Quality feedback agent' during custom install.
If Mozilla crashes, a window should popup with fields where you can describe where, and why it happened if you want. If you don't want to type anything, just click 'send'.
Stacktrace and other info will be automatically sent to Netscape.
I've seen some voices about Moore's law here and about for how long the algorith will last.
I think I've got a comfortable method for estimating how long will it take for a well-designed encryption algorithm to degrade by means of computation technology evolving with respect to Moore's law.
By well-designed encryption algorithm I mean an algorithm, where the only possible way to convert the ciphertext into plaintext without knowing the decryption key is to try every possible combination of the decryption key (brute force attack).
Every additional bit in the key means that there are twice more combinations.
Current updated Moore's law says that the number of transistors per square inch (and computational power) on integrated circuits doubles every 18 months. This gives us a possibility to effortlessly estimate the distance in "breakability" between two (well-designed) encryption algorithms. Every additional bit in the key gives us 1,5 additional year ahead of the weaker (shorter key) encryption algorithm. Thus, if DES uses 56 bits of the key, and IDEA uses 128 bits, and we assume there are no shortcut attacks on thoes algorithms, then given the same resources (read: money to buy computing power) you can break IDEA in the same time than DES if you attack it 108 years later (assuming that Moore's law persists).
Notice that we are considering only symmetrical encryption algorithms! There are other things to consider, whne talking about RSA for example.
Oops, i was too hasteful on my judgement... He adresses that at the end of his paper - "Acknowledgement of previous work". He also points to an alternative location for description of syncookies. GENESIS is a similar idea to syncookies, thus giving robust SYN flood protection to Windows platform.
It doesn't, however, eliminate the idea of Distributed Denial Of Service attacks.
BTW, we should rather call them Distributed Internet Load Denial Of Service attacks, that would make all those sensational news headlines much more funny (imagine a "www.hotgrits.com was taken down by DILDOS attack?" headline?)
The description of his Genesis technology seems somewhat familiar to me. To be specific, it sounds pretty much like the TCP syncookies support in the Linux kernel, however I can't verify that thoroughly because the link to docs that's given in the kernel's config help (ftp://koobera.math.uic.edu/syncookies.ht ml) can't be reached currently.
From the kernel config help: SYN cookies provide protection against this type of attack (SYN flooding) . If you say Y here, the TCP/IP stack will use a cryptographic challenge protocol known as "SYN cookies" to enable legitimate users to continue to connect, even when your machine is under attack. There is no need for the legitimate users to change their TCP/IP software; SYN cookies work transparently to them.
Launched by our servers, they silently route themselves across the Internet, always heading toward their destination.
This is just atropomorphistic description of data being routed over the Internet between its networks.
This reminds me a funny story of my not-so computer savvy friend who has a destructive script-kiddie mentality. He wanted to send someone a trojan (to format his HDD) by e-mail. He asked me if he could run it on his computer and send it running to someone else's...
Slashdot Mirror
How many will voluntarily go compliant by seeking Freedom Software alternatives?
>Some have argued that KOffice merely duplicates
>Microsoft's efforts, but that is not true: Unlike
>MS Word, KWord uses a very simple and efficient
>frame concept, which makes it quite easy to
>create complex layouts. For example I was able to
>create a letter layout with two columns in a
>couple of minutes with no prior knowledge of the
>program.
>
>You just draw frames where you want to have text
>and type in them (if you use frames, you can also
>use KWord without them like a normal word
>processor). You can connect frames so that text
>flows between them, and they are automatically
>extended to subsequent pages.
That's a great innovation on the side of KWord, It's much more efficient, because in Word you have to cope with drawing text fields where you want to have text and then type in them. Word also confuses you with ability to connect those text fields so that text flows between then.
I by myself were getting the international kernel patch up to date for some kernel versions up to 2.4.13. You can get those versions at ftp://office.altkom.com.pl/pub/linux/patch-int/.
I'm not a kernel hacker, though... I just applied them and resolved rejects by hand. They _do_ seem to work on kernel 2.4.13, I tested that with serpent encryption of a filesystem on a loopback device.
> I would guess that the only time that
> transparent windows help is if you have an OS/wm
> that does not offer workspaces or similar.
What about antialiasing? Suppose you have a window of irregular (non-rectangular) shape, You don't want its edges to appear jaggy, and can't predict the color of the background (not to mention background images/wallpapers, lower windows etc.).
The only way to achieve proper anti-aliased edges would be to use semi-transparent pixels at the edges.
And of course we can imagine windows which use transparent areas as a part of their design.
Have you seen various skins to the K-jofol audio player? I'm sure their authors would love to put their hands on an alpha-channel capable windowing system...
>I was happy to see alternative to napster, but I was
>REALLY angry at the fact that people are installing
>spying crap on my system not EVEN with small notices
>anywhere in the install or download process!
What, are you crazy or something? If there were notices you probably wouldn't install that software, would you?
select Start->Programs->Word
select Tools->Language->Thesaurus
type "Windows"
Click "Find"
Result:
Heaven
Good stuff
Orgasm
select Start->Programs->Word
select Tools->Language->Thesaurus
type "Linux"
Click "Find"
Result:
Suck
Inferiority
Goat sex
Actually there's a bug in bugzilla that is about adding a user interface to change user-agent string for Mozilla. See bug 46029.
This is an essential feature Mozilla Mail should have - S/MIME support.
It's a widely accepted standard for digital signatures and encryption of mail messages an PKI (Public Key Infrastructure).
Quick! Mod this one up as funny!
Oh my god, have you guys lost all your sense of humour to mod this down as (-1)troll?
Judge Dredd is legislating? Isn't it mixing judiciary branch with legislative branch?
>A tool like this, if widespread, could effectively
:-))
>contain future buffer-overrun type attacks.
Unless, of course, there were buffer overruns in UrlScan itself (which isn't that improbable considering buffer overruns in the "Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server"
Security holes happen in security products too.
manned by mice
Shouldn't that be miced?
Read that post from bugtraq archives: The proposal of creating such an automatic healer worm started a fierce discussion.
No, you got the wrong version. It actually is:
/*!sdlavroT suniL kcuf*/
Yes, in Mozilla yopu can store passwords, but in the world of network computing you won't use a single machine from which you access services, one machine where your passwods can be stored. You'll likely connect from your palmtop, your office terminal, your toaster/refrigerator etc.
So unfortunately this has to be a central authentication entity.
Ok, wiseguy, define "kernal".
>We just don't have that great a motivation to improve processor
>technology these days. We have processor technology that is beyond the
>dreams of engineers 30 years ago. For the most part, we have reached a
>point where most of the needs of applications of massively powerful
>computing are currently realized in today's machines.
Ha! Just wait till Quake 4 hits the shelves, we'll see what you'll be saying then!
Seriously, current computing power is FAR below what is needed for realistic simulation of reality. When you look at CGI in the movies nowadays, and you've got a good eye, you'll see it still 'feels' artificial, though they used multi-computer render-farms for them, and computations took months. And that's only flat 2D projection of a 3D scene, in a resolution (about 8000X8000 pixels) that's much less than what single human eye can achieve, and sound is still digitized from natural sources, and they don't do all the simultaion of physics - much of that is pre-directed, 'hand'-animated, and all the logic of the scene is a human's work (computers didn't process the 'what if a ship hits an iceberg' rules when they were making Titanic!)
No, today's machines are far from realizing the need for computing power. Not only in VR uses. What about scientific processing of data? Would SETI exist if we didn't need much more processing power than we have now? What about intuitive user interfaces? I saw Nautilus from my new Mandrake 8.0 _crawl_ on my PIII 550, 256 Mb RAM just yesterday.
Do they plan to release plugins for other browsers? No word about that in their faq...
Additional info:
For win32, builds with talkback are the ones named mozilla-win32-talkback.zip. You just unzip them and bun bin/mozilla.exe.
For Linux, builds with talkback are the ones named mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gny-sea.tar.gz. You un-targz them, then run mozilla-installer/mozilla-installer. To get talkback, you must choose the component named 'Quality feedback agent' during custom install.
If Mozilla crashes, a window should popup with fields where you can describe where, and why it happened if you want. If you don't want to type anything, just click 'send'.
Stacktrace and other info will be automatically sent to Netscape.
That's similar to geeks:
In order to find a partner one geek specimen has to find a female infected with the same "IRC channel" germ.
Heh, that one amused me. This law's name (CIPA) in Polish means "pussy"...
I've seen some voices about Moore's law here and about for how long the algorith will last.
I think I've got a comfortable method for estimating how long will it take for a well-designed encryption algorithm to degrade by means of computation technology evolving with respect to Moore's law.
By well-designed encryption algorithm I mean an algorithm, where the only possible way to convert the ciphertext into plaintext without knowing the decryption key is to try every possible combination of the decryption key (brute force attack).
Every additional bit in the key means that there are twice more combinations.
Current updated Moore's law says that the number of transistors per square inch (and computational power) on integrated circuits doubles every 18 months. This gives us a possibility to effortlessly estimate the distance in "breakability" between two (well-designed) encryption algorithms.
Every additional bit in the key gives us 1,5 additional year ahead of the weaker (shorter key) encryption algorithm.
Thus, if DES uses 56 bits of the key, and IDEA uses 128 bits, and we assume there are no shortcut attacks on thoes algorithms, then given the same resources (read: money to buy computing power) you can break IDEA in the same time than DES if you attack it 108 years later (assuming that Moore's law persists).
Notice that we are considering only symmetrical encryption algorithms! There are other things to consider, whne talking about RSA for example.
Oops, i was too hasteful on my judgement... He adresses that at the end of his paper - "Acknowledgement of previous work". He also points to an alternative location for description of syncookies.
GENESIS is a similar idea to syncookies, thus giving robust SYN flood protection to Windows platform.
It doesn't, however, eliminate the idea of Distributed Denial Of Service attacks.
BTW, we should rather call them Distributed Internet Load Denial Of Service attacks, that would make all those sensational news headlines much more funny (imagine a "www.hotgrits.com was taken down by DILDOS attack?" headline?)
The description of his Genesis technology seems somewhat familiar to me. .ht ml) can't be reached currently.
To be specific, it sounds pretty much like the TCP syncookies support in the Linux kernel, however I can't verify that thoroughly because the link to docs that's given in the kernel's config help (ftp://koobera.math.uic.edu/syncookies
From the kernel config help:
SYN cookies provide protection against this type of attack (SYN flooding) . If you say Y here, the TCP/IP stack will use a cryptographic challenge protocol known as "SYN cookies" to enable legitimate users to continue to connect, even when your machine is under attack. There is no need for the legitimate users to change their TCP/IP software; SYN cookies work transparently to them.
Launched by our servers, they silently route themselves across the Internet, always heading toward their destination.
This is just atropomorphistic description of data being routed over the Internet between its networks.
This reminds me a funny story of my not-so computer savvy friend who has a destructive script-kiddie mentality. He wanted to send someone a trojan (to format his HDD) by e-mail. He asked me if he could run it on his computer and send it running to someone else's...