The other important point for commercial companies is ease of support. They don't want their technical helpline clogged with people calling because their software doesn't work on some obscure distribution, so it makes it simpler for them to say "we support this on RH 6.1 only" - chances are it'll work on other distros in the Linux world, but they don't want to be bogged down and legally obliged by their support contract to make sure it supports every little thing, and they don't want to be solving problems caused not by their program, but by some random mini-distro's braindead setup.
Remember, many of these companies are coming over from the Windows world -where the OSes (wince, win98-on-dos, wnt) microsoft would have you believe are similar are actually very, very different (apart from the GUI look-and-feel).
It's far from finished, since the programmers spent the past while working on the 4.0 version of their spectrum emulator for the psion. (which is also quite impressive...)
By the way, if one is after wild and wacky theories, as well as pretty damn good ones, you can do worse than check out the pre-print server on xxx.lanl.gov (Uk mirror at xxx.soton.ac.uk) This is one of the oldest sites on the net.
YOu can now set the DPI for fonts. For reasons best known to Mozilla, it defaults to ninety-five on my system (xdpyinfo insists I'm on a 75 dpi display...) BTW, how do you tell X what DPI your display is - mine's closer to 120 DPI, being an old 15inch mointor I've underclocked to do 1280x1024@50Hz (Modeline "1280x1024@50" 87.602 1280 1312 1624 1656 1024 1025 1031 1058 -HSync -VSync) Yes, I know what a silly idea that is...
Alos, M14 is only finding a tiny subset of my installed fonts - another poster suggests earlier versions found his (truetype) fonts, and now M14 doesn't, but I don't have earlier versions around to check this, and it doesn't seem to find a lot of non-tt fonts too...
Re:Compatible with X windows
on
MacOS X DP3
·
· Score: 1
The Display Ghostscript project is still chugging along. Now, I know GS reads PDFs, too - so could Display Ghostscript get a one-up on the commercial Display Postscript implementations by implementing a Display-PDF API in the style of Quartz as well as the Display-PS API ???
Well, I just installed linux22, and it's running linked against glibc2.1 atm. Don't know if that's how its supposed to be run, but it hasn't crashed yet... IT also seems to be pretty damn fast compared with 4.7(0) anyway.
What is unsupported-linux22 supposed to be linked against, glibc2.0 or 2.1 (or even libc5?)? Mandrake ships with a wrapper script to ensure that Netscape is linked against glibc2.0 libraries, which makes sense, since they ship supported-linux20_glibc2 in their RPMs, but if there is a Netscape compiled to link to glibc2.1, I'd rather use that.
Re:pretty, yet incomprehensible
on
MacOS X DP3
·
· Score: 1
But that means that you actually have to move the mouse to the gadget/icon. UI No-No.:-( Better if the gadgets go from ghosted to bright or monochrome to full-colour on mouseover, like IE5 button bar. Also, close gadget near to others is not usually a good thing, and one of the worst things about MS-Windows. I have my close gadget on right, iconify on left.
I also miss the zoom gadgets from AmigaOS - rather than just preserving maximise/minimise, you could warp between two arbitrary window orientations. I'd like to see this generalised to n arbitrary window orientations, perhaps with a "warp" drop-down menu preserving a window posion history.
Also, Enlightenment already does the icon-is-window-snapshot thing.
These have been around for years in Britain. I remember seeing them in the Osborne "Home Computer Course" magazine. I've never used one myself, but they look cool, anyway.:-) www.maltron.co.uk
You really shouldn't expect your mail to be private. Intelligence agencies have been reading other people's mail for centuries - they've got extremely good at it.
The original apple macs changed disk spin speed based on head position, giving 800k 3.5 inch floppies, when the PC had 720k. That's why DD Mac formatted disks can't be read by PC hardware (Apple then changed to ordinary 1440k disk formats (except with their weird twin-pronged filesystem, of course))
Of course, the amiga formatted the same 3.5 inch floppies to 880k without variable spin-speed trickery...
if you use lilo, you can usually convince win98 to live somewhere else (note that it says in the docs this could break DMA drivers, but mine kept working, AFAICT). In lilo.conf :
It could be nice if as many config files as possible were in some standardised markup language, such as some XML-family language. That way, a GUI tool could parse them, or you could edit them directly.
Actually, it would be nice if all the cli tools output a standard command template that could have a gui wrapper autmatically put around it. The amiga almost had this - every compliant command produced a template when called with ? as a command line option, whcih could be fed into a tool such as Gui4Cli (on aminet) to build a GUI automatically. The template wasn't quite general enough for everything, but if each command output a GUI code in XML when called with foo --gui, then very newbie-friendly distros could be built.
The problem with that is that it perpetuates the existence of the patent office. It is in the patent office's own interest to grant as many patents as they can, because that keeps the bureaucracy pushing paper around, which means the officer's jobs are secure. This process happens in most government offices, not just the patent office - they tend towards big, inefficiently run lumps, because that way, they support more layers of otherwise useless middle managers.
Much better to let the patent office wither, and push to have software, algorithmic and genetic patents either rendered unenforceable, or reduced to a realistic lifespan of, say, 1.5 to 2 years ( a figure obtained by scaling the 17 year span by the depreciation of an automobile compared to the depreciation of a computer( ca. ten times as fast))
Hmm... I wonder how "mobile linux" will stack up against EPOC32, which is a pretty good OS for palmtops?
Also, this processor could be pretty cool for running the tao virtual machine that amiga are using for their network environment - remember, amiga have already said they're going to run stuff on top of linux in palmtops.
It sounds to me that like it will use the DRI infrastructure in XFree 4.0, but provide an OpenGL-certified drop-in replacement for the (Mesa) default libGL.so and libGLU.so that is used for the Open-Source drivers, and presumably a DRI-compliant XFree4.0 driver module and linux kernel module, which could all be in the form of closed-source replacement files.
There was a move to standardise an ABI for GL applications on linux a short time ago, so that commercial offerings would be possible within the DRI/Mesa/GL framework.
It is true - certain TV sets used to give out quite a bit of X-Ray radiation. Modern TVs + computer VDUs are built to minimise leakage. www.tiac.net/users/shansen/belljar/xray.htm The paragraph towards the end is the relevant bit
Hmm... maybe it'll run the tao virtual processor thing too. Read through the intent/elate technology brief on their pages, and a code-morphing OS seems ideally suited to a code-morphing processor, don't you think?
I reckon one aim is to run the Tao virtual processor natively. It's like a Java VM, but for any language. It has the potential to achieve the write-once run anywhere promise that Sun failed to deliver. Pretty cool. Also, Tao have been linked with Sony and Amiga, who have both been linked with Transmeta.
The Amiga (maysherestinpeace) got around this by having very little in the way of memory protection (just some semaphore locking) - and using decentralised message passing by reference - Each process could open MsgPorts, which were just structures to hang linked lists of pointers to messages from. Rather than copy a message from one process's memory space to another, a pointer to a message structure was simply passed from one to the other. While the pointer was being used by the other program, your process wasn't supposed to play with the area of memory containing your message. Messages absolutely, positively, had to be replied to, or the system could come crashing down around your ears. The system was blindingly fast, for the time, and was one of the reasons why the amiga had such high data throughput for the time for video work and the like - the whole system was built around messages that could be any size of allocated area of memory, that could be passed from program to program without any "real" memcopys. There was little kernel bottleneck, since the kernel was little more than an interrupt server to order tasks to switch for preemptive multitasking - in the absence of memory protection, device drivers were just normal programs, the data from devices could "short-circuit" path direct to the memory owned by the program using it, since the program just got a pointer protected by a semaphore lock.
Obviously, this architecture meant that later implementing full memory protection was next to impossible.
The Amiga system C and 68k macro assembler includes are really fascinating - very well written, but quite different to mainstream systems these days.
Most likely, it would have been found by/someone/ who was semi-randomly pounding on a test binary, just like the way a lot of other exploits are found in binary-only products. They wouldn't necessarily tell anyone, in fact, they might well keep it secret until they'd used it to transfer as much wealth or information as they wanted to their own hands. Or they might tell all their friends on some irc channel. Open Source programs are not immune to this, obviously. However, the access to source code means that concerned users can audit it themselves, rather than the holes being found by people who want to use them for their own, possibly criminal, ends. It also encourages the developer to write better code in the first place, since there'll be other people looking at it.
Slashdot Mirror
Make sure he checks out www.calcaria.net/ for the port to Psion 5mx hardware (ARM710) - Netbook is StrongARM, AFAIK.
The other important point for commercial companies is ease of support. They don't want their technical helpline clogged with people calling because their software doesn't work on some obscure distribution, so it makes it simpler for them to say "we support this on RH 6.1 only" - chances are it'll work on other distros in the Linux world, but they don't want to be bogged down and legally obliged by their support contract to make sure it supports every little thing, and they don't want to be solving problems caused not by their program, but by some random mini-distro's braindead setup.
Remember, many of these companies are coming over from the Windows world -where the OSes (wince, win98-on-dos, wnt) microsoft would have you believe are similar are actually very, very different (apart from the GUI look-and-feel).
Psion Doom port v0.2 (somewhat incomplete)
is on www.palmtop.com/encore.html
It's far from finished, since the programmers spent the past while working on the 4.0 version of their spectrum emulator for the psion. (which is also quite impressive...)
Here's further information on the this theory. I think it's quite good, myself. Note that New scientist barely scratches the surface of it:
www.physics.adelaide.ed u.au/ASGRG/ACGRG1/papers/cahill.ps
By the way, if one is after wild and wacky theories, as well as pretty damn good ones, you can do worse than check out the pre-print server on xxx.lanl.gov (Uk mirror at xxx.soton.ac.uk) This is one of the oldest sites on the net.
YOu can now set the DPI for fonts. For reasons best known to Mozilla, it defaults to ninety-five on my system (xdpyinfo insists I'm on a 75 dpi display...) BTW, how do you tell X what DPI your display is - mine's closer to 120 DPI, being an old 15inch mointor I've underclocked to do 1280x1024@50Hz
(Modeline "1280x1024@50" 87.602 1280 1312 1624 1656 1024 1025 1031 1058 -HSync -VSync) Yes, I know what a silly idea that is...
Alos, M14 is only finding a tiny subset of my installed fonts - another poster suggests earlier versions found his (truetype) fonts, and now M14 doesn't, but I don't have earlier versions around to check this, and it doesn't seem to find a lot of non-tt fonts too...
The Display Ghostscript project is still chugging along. Now, I know GS reads PDFs, too - so could Display Ghostscript get a one-up on the commercial Display Postscript implementations by implementing a Display-PDF API in the style of Quartz as well as the Display-PS API ???
Well, I just installed linux22, and it's running linked against glibc2.1 atm. Don't know if that's how its supposed to be run, but it hasn't crashed yet... IT also seems to be pretty damn fast compared with 4.7(0) anyway.
What is unsupported-linux22 supposed to be linked against, glibc2.0 or 2.1 (or even libc5?)? Mandrake ships with a wrapper script to ensure that Netscape is linked against glibc2.0 libraries, which makes sense, since they ship supported-linux20_glibc2 in their RPMs, but if there is a Netscape compiled to link to glibc2.1, I'd rather use that.
But that means that you actually have to move the mouse to the gadget/icon. UI No-No. :-( Better if the gadgets go from ghosted to bright or monochrome to full-colour on mouseover, like IE5 button bar. Also, close gadget near to others is not usually a good thing, and one of the worst things about MS-Windows. I have my close gadget on right, iconify on left.
I also miss the zoom gadgets from AmigaOS - rather than just preserving maximise/minimise, you could warp between two arbitrary window orientations. I'd like to see this generalised to n arbitrary window orientations, perhaps with a "warp" drop-down menu preserving a window posion history.
Also, Enlightenment already does the icon-is-window-snapshot thing.
These have been around for years in Britain. I remember seeing them in the Osborne "Home Computer Course" magazine. I've never used one myself, but they look cool, anyway. :-) www.maltron.co.uk
You really shouldn't expect your mail to be private. Intelligence agencies have been reading other people's mail for centuries - they've got extremely good at it.
The original apple macs changed disk spin speed based on head position, giving 800k 3.5 inch floppies, when the PC had 720k. That's why DD Mac formatted disks can't be read by PC hardware (Apple then changed to ordinary 1440k disk formats (except with their weird twin-pronged filesystem, of course))
Of course, the amiga formatted the same 3.5 inch floppies to 880k without variable spin-speed trickery...
if you use lilo, you can usually convince win98 to live somewhere else (note that it says in the docs this could break DMA drivers, but mine kept working, AFAICT). In lilo.conf :
other=/dev/hdc1
label=msdos
table=/dev/hdc
map-drive=0x80
to=0x81
map-drive=0x81
to=0x80
this swaps hda+hdc from windows' perspective, so it thinks it's on hda1, when it's on hdc1.
It could be nice if as many config files as possible were in some standardised markup language, such as some XML-family language. That way, a GUI tool could parse them, or you could edit them directly.
Actually, it would be nice if all the cli tools output a standard command template that could have a gui wrapper autmatically put around it. The amiga almost had this - every compliant command produced a template when called with ? as a command line option, whcih could be fed into a tool such as Gui4Cli (on aminet) to build a GUI automatically. The template wasn't quite general enough for everything, but if each command output a GUI code in XML when called with foo --gui, then very newbie-friendly distros could be built.
The problem with that is that it perpetuates the existence of the patent office. It is in the patent office's own interest to grant as many patents as they can, because that keeps the bureaucracy pushing paper around, which means the officer's jobs are secure. This process happens in most government offices, not just the patent office - they tend towards big, inefficiently run lumps, because that way, they support more layers of otherwise useless middle managers.
Much better to let the patent office wither, and push to have software, algorithmic and genetic patents either rendered unenforceable, or reduced to a realistic lifespan of, say, 1.5 to 2 years ( a figure obtained by scaling the 17 year span by the depreciation of an automobile compared to the depreciation of a computer( ca. ten times as fast))
Hmm... I wonder how "mobile linux" will stack up against EPOC32, which is a pretty good OS for palmtops?
Also, this processor could be pretty cool for running the tao virtual machine that amiga are using for their network environment - remember, amiga have already said they're going to run stuff on top of linux in palmtops.
It sounds to me that like it will use the DRI infrastructure in XFree 4.0, but provide an OpenGL-certified drop-in replacement for the (Mesa) default libGL.so and libGLU.so that is used for the Open-Source drivers, and presumably a DRI-compliant XFree4.0 driver module and linux kernel module, which could all be in the form of closed-source replacement files.
There was a move to standardise an ABI for GL applications on linux a short time ago, so that commercial offerings would be possible within the DRI/Mesa/GL framework.
Link:
reality.sgi.com/opengl/linux/linuxbase.html
It is true - certain TV sets used to give out quite a bit of X-Ray radiation. Modern TVs + computer VDUs are built to minimise leakage.
www.tiac.net/users/shansen/belljar/xray.htm
The paragraph towards the end is the relevant bit
Hmm... maybe it'll run the tao virtual processor thing too. Read through the intent/elate technology brief on their pages, and a code-morphing OS seems ideally suited to a code-morphing processor, don't you think?
I reckon one aim is to run the Tao virtual processor natively. It's like a Java VM, but for any language. It has the potential to achieve the write-once run anywhere promise that Sun failed to deliver. Pretty cool. Also, Tao have been linked with Sony and Amiga, who have both been linked with Transmeta.
Here's a link for people interested in developing a GPL'd bios:
www.freiburg.linux.de/openbios/
The Amiga (maysherestinpeace) got around this by having very little in the way of memory protection (just some semaphore locking) - and using decentralised message passing by reference - Each process could open MsgPorts, which were just structures to hang linked lists of pointers to messages from. Rather than copy a message from one process's memory space to another, a pointer to a message structure was simply passed from one to the other. While the pointer was being used by the other program, your process wasn't supposed to play with the area of memory containing your message. Messages absolutely, positively, had to be replied to, or the system could come crashing down around your ears. The system was blindingly fast, for the time, and was one of the reasons why the amiga had such high data throughput for the time for video work and the like - the whole system was built around messages that could be any size of allocated area of memory, that could be passed from program to program without any "real" memcopys. There was little kernel bottleneck, since the kernel was little more than an interrupt server to order tasks to switch for preemptive multitasking - in the absence of memory protection, device drivers were just normal programs, the data from devices could "short-circuit" path direct to the memory owned by the program using it, since the program just got a pointer protected by a semaphore lock.
Obviously, this architecture meant that later implementing full memory protection was next to impossible.
The Amiga system C and 68k macro assembler includes are really fascinating - very well written, but quite different to mainstream systems these days.
Most likely, it would have been found by /someone/ who was semi-randomly pounding on a test binary, just like the way a lot of other exploits are found in binary-only products. They wouldn't necessarily tell anyone, in fact, they might well keep it secret until they'd used it to transfer as much wealth or information as they wanted to their own hands. Or they might tell all their friends on some irc channel. Open Source programs are not immune to this, obviously. However, the access to source code means that concerned users can audit it themselves, rather than the holes being found by people who want to use them for their own, possibly criminal, ends. It also encourages the developer to write better code in the first place, since there'll be other people looking at it.
You're thinking of the accursed Packard Bell, not Gateway.
AFAIK, GEOS is now called New Deal. It's still around, and is very cool - turn a 286 PC into a full-featured desktop.
www.newdealinc.com