At this point nobody's going to be surprised if any device tested has blatant security flaws. The only interesting story would be if someone found a device with no actual flaws. That would be news.
A machine without flaws? No, that just means it wasn't tested well enough.
Just like any other OS. Supported hardware works, and in this case, backwards compatibility is maintained. Unsupported hardware, shockingly, doesn't work.
I don't know, some of the "unsupported" hardware does happen to work just fine on Linux. Not often, but sometimes.
Which seems like a good idea to me, except for the following list of requirements..
Will it run window's apps? You are doing to have to support running miscellaneous windows applications fairly well, up front. Things like Turbo Tax, Quicken, old games and the like will just need to work, out of the box, and not require special knowledge to install. Dorking around with Wine should NOT be required.
What apps will it come with? It's going to need to have a fairly complete stable of applications, starting with Office. They are going to need to look and feel almost exactly like Microsoft's offerings and do everything Office does and more.
Will it infringe on somebodies IP? I'm sure Microsoft has some kind of IP or patent on the look and feel or something they can use to drag the project over the coals and kill it.
As the GP said though, what does that have to do with Linus and his kernel?
Nothing apparently.
Linus is blaming somebody else for Linux not taking the desktop, this is not to say he's not right, it's just amusing that he would blame others and tells me he's not interested in helping with the solution.
Cannot disagree with you on most of this. Yes Fusion reactors are much more complex and therefor expensive to make. However, you have to look at the whole return on investment throughout the life cycle of the plant. Fission creates some really nasty byproducts in large volumes that will have to be safely disposed of/stored for centuries before it is safe. Fusion creates nasty things too, but they are a lot less in volume and decay a whole lot faster. Less volume + faster decay = much less expensive to operate.
Then there is the whole safety question where Fusion wins hands down. You want to stop generating heat? Just stop putting fuel into it and it's going to stop pretty quick. Fission? It can take months to get a reactor in a stable thermal condition...
But, we can only argue about this for now. Neither of us knows if Fusion will be cost effective or not. You think not, I'm not so sure, it's still possible this will work out. Until we try though, we will never know if the existing designs are going to be cost effective or not. But I caution you, even things like Steel and Aluminum which we use almost like sand, used to be extremely expensive. Can you imagine what it would have cost to build a steel bridge in the 1800's? Or how much a light aircraft's weight in Aluminum sheeting would have cost then? It would have been a LOT of money. Now? Cheap, so cheap we throw away aluminum cans without a second thought.
If he waits a little longer, he can probably just take it without anybody noticing.
Great point. Maybe we can take over tablets and cell phones with Linux, er, Android, er, whatever... It's not like Microsoft is making much of a play for these... (Windows 8, 8.1, and 9 not withstanding)
No links, Really? in many years of reading his site daily i'm not sure i recall when a story was posted without a single f*cking link to the source material or supporting info.
Perhaps this thing is entirely made up...
Right... Like having an internet link means it's a real story...
If you are the developer, it's great! You can now static link your application into one file if you you use only Qt libs without being forced to license your code using GPL or buying a commercial license. You still *can* give your code away, but you don't have to.
If you are an end user of a Qt application, nothing really changes for you, except that subsequent software deliveries get simpler to install. Now you don't have to make sure all the necessary shared libs are available when the application needs them. You may or may not be entitled to get source code, but that's not changed.
For Qt it means that more people will use it for all sorts of things because now developers can protect their code using any license they choose.
Except for the end user, who really won't see any difference, Seems like an upgrade to me. Developers get to choose what license suits their business model and Qt get's used more.
If they are dealing with you, a private party, there are and should be limits on what is public information. If you have an employment contract with the City, some information about you the city has is not public and should not be public.
So, I'm saying that there are limits on what can be made "public" information. This also means that not all government activity is going to be in the public domain. There is information that must be protected. I.E. the government should be able to keep secretes in some cases. Contracts with private parties can be one of these cases.
There is no such thing as a "private contract". A contract, by nature, is an agreement that the state will enforce.
That is not even close to being true. If I have a contract with you that I break, it's NOT the state that files the lawsuit to enforce the contract, it's you. The function of the state is to make sure the litigation process is fair, but it's not in their wheel house to do the actual enforcement of contracts between two other parties. They have no standing, no vested interest in such contracts.
Now if I loose in court, then you have the legal right to demand that the judgment be collected, and have the right to request help from the state to secure a civil judgement, but it's still up to you to see that it is enforced. If you don't take me to court, or don't try and collect, the state doesn't care and won't take it upon themselves to enforce the contract or collect the debt.
The state doesn't enforce contracts between two parties (Unless one of the parties is the government).
So there ARE private contracts. And the state is not involved in them.
I have to disagree. If you do business with the government, you lose some of the privacy that you would have in a private transaction. Secrecy in government is just too tempting to abuse.
Oh don't get me wrong, I'm all for disclosure of contracts let by the city for city business. I'm saying that there are things which are NOT subject to disclosure. City employee discipline records, utility bills, income tax receipts and a whole host of things fall into this category. Out of court settlements where "do not discuss publicly" clauses are in effect seem to be one of those things.
There are things that need to be kept private too.
I'm not arguing that disclosure of contract terms for building roads, buildings and conducting other city business shouldn't be public, only that there is a subset of that information that needs to be kept private. A court settlement might fall in that category.
Before you go and say *everything* needs to be public, think about what you are saying. There is no way that the city should be compelled to disclose the contents of say it's employee files, or if it has a water utility department, who is delinquent on their bills or what the customer may have agreed to repay and how. You don't need to know who's paying their local income taxes (in places where they are collected). Obviously, not *everything* is subject to disclosure.
BTW, kickbacks usually are NOT in contracts, and cronyism should be readily apparent by who's doing the work. Disclosure doesn't really fix these issues.
The main difference between fission and fusion is the cost of clean up. Fission is really messy, with radioactive materials in abundance. Fusion still has waste, but not nearly as much.
Why would a government body have any right to privacy at all?
Do you *really* mean this? Think about the kinds of things City governments know about you, you want it to all be public information? You want them to publish the names and addresses of everybody who applied for a business license or is behind on their water bills? Filed a police complaint, got put into collections? How about those who live in cities that tax income, you want to make who's paying taxes and their SSN's public data?
I don't think you've thought this all though very far.
I only need to know in broad terms what they are doing, not the specific details. There are things I am not entitled to know about government and how they interact with other individuals. So I don't agree with your premise.
IF you think you have a right to know, file a Freedom of Information Act request for the information. See what they will give you.
An "out of court" settlement is not a legal precedent, beyond the fact the city settled. No lawyer is going to provide a brief that claims "Well because they settled before, they need to settle with my client too."
What I love is none of this 'terms kept confidential' nonsense that is so typical in court settlements.
The public has a right to know.
You do realize that settlements are basically private contracts right? Are you really saying that I must publicly disclose the terms of any private contract I am a party to, just because the "Public has a right to know"?
No, No, they don't have a right to know. I may allow you to use my intellectual property and by contract disclose it to you for your use, but that doesn't mean everybody in the world is now entitled to see everything.
Slashdot Mirror
At this point nobody's going to be surprised if any device tested has blatant security flaws. The only interesting story would be if someone found a device with no actual flaws. That would be news.
A machine without flaws? No, that just means it wasn't tested well enough.
Just like any other OS. Supported hardware works, and in this case, backwards compatibility is maintained. Unsupported hardware, shockingly, doesn't work.
I don't know, some of the "unsupported" hardware does happen to work just fine on Linux. Not often, but sometimes.
Which seems like a good idea to me, except for the following list of requirements..
Will it run window's apps? You are doing to have to support running miscellaneous windows applications fairly well, up front. Things like Turbo Tax, Quicken, old games and the like will just need to work, out of the box, and not require special knowledge to install. Dorking around with Wine should NOT be required.
What apps will it come with? It's going to need to have a fairly complete stable of applications, starting with Office. They are going to need to look and feel almost exactly like Microsoft's offerings and do everything Office does and more.
Will it infringe on somebodies IP? I'm sure Microsoft has some kind of IP or patent on the look and feel or something they can use to drag the project over the coals and kill it.
If you do this, PLEASE use Apache licensed stuff!
Neither are going to happen, so move along and focus on something that CAN happen.
I don't know. Seems Putin is making inroads into getting the old gang back together.
As the GP said though, what does that have to do with Linus and his kernel?
Nothing apparently.
Linus is blaming somebody else for Linux not taking the desktop, this is not to say he's not right, it's just amusing that he would blame others and tells me he's not interested in helping with the solution.
Where I work I have a Windows desktop, but web browsing is done on Linux. You wouldn't know it though if you didn't look close.
There are places that use Linux desktops.
perhaps you can enlighten us as to why he's wrong
I never said he was wrong... Only that he's true to form..
So he's right, but for the wrong reasons? How do you know when he's right for the right reasons?
Boy, you just insist on reading into my post what's not there, twice now. I think you are doing it on purpose....
Torvalds is right... I just find it amusing that he is quoted to be blaming somebody else and being "True to form." Clear yet?
Cannot disagree with you on most of this. Yes Fusion reactors are much more complex and therefor expensive to make. However, you have to look at the whole return on investment throughout the life cycle of the plant. Fission creates some really nasty byproducts in large volumes that will have to be safely disposed of/stored for centuries before it is safe. Fusion creates nasty things too, but they are a lot less in volume and decay a whole lot faster. Less volume + faster decay = much less expensive to operate.
Then there is the whole safety question where Fusion wins hands down. You want to stop generating heat? Just stop putting fuel into it and it's going to stop pretty quick. Fission? It can take months to get a reactor in a stable thermal condition...
But, we can only argue about this for now. Neither of us knows if Fusion will be cost effective or not. You think not, I'm not so sure, it's still possible this will work out. Until we try though, we will never know if the existing designs are going to be cost effective or not. But I caution you, even things like Steel and Aluminum which we use almost like sand, used to be extremely expensive. Can you imagine what it would have cost to build a steel bridge in the 1800's? Or how much a light aircraft's weight in Aluminum sheeting would have cost then? It would have been a LOT of money. Now? Cheap, so cheap we throw away aluminum cans without a second thought.
perhaps you can enlighten us as to why he's wrong
I never said he was wrong... Only that he's true to form..
If he waits a little longer, he can probably just take it without anybody noticing.
Great point. Maybe we can take over tablets and cell phones with Linux, er, Android, er, whatever... It's not like Microsoft is making much of a play for these... (Windows 8, 8.1, and 9 not withstanding)
In true Torvalds fashion, he blames Linux's failure to take the desktop on.... What exactly?
Torvalds doesn't see the desktop as being a kernel problem
Now that's a shocker.. It cannot be HIS fault.
No links, Really? in many years of reading his site daily i'm not sure i recall when a story was posted without a single f*cking link to the source material or supporting info.
Perhaps this thing is entirely made up...
Right... Like having an internet link means it's a real story...
Look on the bright side, there is a story to link to now: http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
You clicked though? Going anyplace?
I was losing sleep over this.
Uh, WAKE UP dude! They just changed the license on Qt!!!
Downgrades you mean.
Depends on what you want from Qt.
If you are the developer, it's great! You can now static link your application into one file if you you use only Qt libs without being forced to license your code using GPL or buying a commercial license. You still *can* give your code away, but you don't have to.
If you are an end user of a Qt application, nothing really changes for you, except that subsequent software deliveries get simpler to install. Now you don't have to make sure all the necessary shared libs are available when the application needs them. You may or may not be entitled to get source code, but that's not changed.
For Qt it means that more people will use it for all sorts of things because now developers can protect their code using any license they choose.
Except for the end user, who really won't see any difference, Seems like an upgrade to me. Developers get to choose what license suits their business model and Qt get's used more.
If they are dealing with you, a private party, there are and should be limits on what is public information. If you have an employment contract with the City, some information about you the city has is not public and should not be public.
So, I'm saying that there are limits on what can be made "public" information. This also means that not all government activity is going to be in the public domain. There is information that must be protected. I.E. the government should be able to keep secretes in some cases. Contracts with private parties can be one of these cases.
There is no such thing as a "private contract". A contract, by nature, is an agreement that the state will enforce.
That is not even close to being true. If I have a contract with you that I break, it's NOT the state that files the lawsuit to enforce the contract, it's you. The function of the state is to make sure the litigation process is fair, but it's not in their wheel house to do the actual enforcement of contracts between two other parties. They have no standing, no vested interest in such contracts.
Now if I loose in court, then you have the legal right to demand that the judgment be collected, and have the right to request help from the state to secure a civil judgement, but it's still up to you to see that it is enforced. If you don't take me to court, or don't try and collect, the state doesn't care and won't take it upon themselves to enforce the contract or collect the debt.
The state doesn't enforce contracts between two parties (Unless one of the parties is the government).
So there ARE private contracts. And the state is not involved in them.
No, No, they don't have a right to know.
I have to disagree. If you do business with the government, you lose some of the privacy that you would have in a private transaction. Secrecy in government is just too tempting to abuse.
Oh don't get me wrong, I'm all for disclosure of contracts let by the city for city business. I'm saying that there are things which are NOT subject to disclosure. City employee discipline records, utility bills, income tax receipts and a whole host of things fall into this category. Out of court settlements where "do not discuss publicly" clauses are in effect seem to be one of those things.
There are things that need to be kept private too.
I'm not arguing that disclosure of contract terms for building roads, buildings and conducting other city business shouldn't be public, only that there is a subset of that information that needs to be kept private. A court settlement might fall in that category.
Before you go and say *everything* needs to be public, think about what you are saying. There is no way that the city should be compelled to disclose the contents of say it's employee files, or if it has a water utility department, who is delinquent on their bills or what the customer may have agreed to repay and how. You don't need to know who's paying their local income taxes (in places where they are collected). Obviously, not *everything* is subject to disclosure.
BTW, kickbacks usually are NOT in contracts, and cronyism should be readily apparent by who's doing the work. Disclosure doesn't really fix these issues.
The main difference between fission and fusion is the cost of clean up. Fission is really messy, with radioactive materials in abundance. Fusion still has waste, but not nearly as much.
Why would a government body have any right to privacy at all?
Do you *really* mean this? Think about the kinds of things City governments know about you, you want it to all be public information? You want them to publish the names and addresses of everybody who applied for a business license or is behind on their water bills? Filed a police complaint, got put into collections? How about those who live in cities that tax income, you want to make who's paying taxes and their SSN's public data?
I don't think you've thought this all though very far.
I only need to know in broad terms what they are doing, not the specific details. There are things I am not entitled to know about government and how they interact with other individuals. So I don't agree with your premise.
IF you think you have a right to know, file a Freedom of Information Act request for the information. See what they will give you.
Then file a freedom of information request. Even government has reasons to keep things private, such settlements included.
Out of court = Not public record
Court ordered Settlement = Public record
File a Freedom of Information request if you think this should be public.
An "out of court" settlement is not a legal precedent, beyond the fact the city settled. No lawyer is going to provide a brief that claims "Well because they settled before, they need to settle with my client too."
What I love is none of this 'terms kept confidential' nonsense that is so typical in court settlements.
The public has a right to know.
You do realize that settlements are basically private contracts right? Are you really saying that I must publicly disclose the terms of any private contract I am a party to, just because the "Public has a right to know"?
No, No, they don't have a right to know. I may allow you to use my intellectual property and by contract disclose it to you for your use, but that doesn't mean everybody in the world is now entitled to see everything.