Why would you think that? Images in a public place, e.g. the internet, or for a GPL project are not public domain by default. They're under whatever terms their creator wants them to be.
They would think that because all background images on kdelook.org have a license - check for yourself, it's a requirement when you submit to give a license for the image. A Creative Commons license prohibits commercial use without the author's consent. That license was applied as of April 24. What the license was prior to that is up for debate - but if it was on kdelook.org it was not under default copyright as claimed - it was under some license, be that GPL, public Domain, Perl Artistic License, MPL or what have you. As others have stated - depending on what that previous license was, Linspire are wither perfectly okay, or copyright infringing bastards. Until we know what the previous license was, we shouldn't leap to judgement.
Thanks. I was aware that writing and implementing a default policy that was going to work well is a non trivial task - I wasn't aware how far they had progressed with that. It soudns like enough people had prolems with the policy settings etc. in Test2 that it is being delayed. As long as it is going to be folded in properly once all the quirks have been sorted out I'm happy.
Anyone know exactly what the issues with SELinux by default were? Having SELinux, or something equivalent system using the LSM kernel module as a default is the way that Linux should e heading - it would dramatically increase the security of Linux systems. I was looking forward to Fedora Core 2 being the first to include it by default, and anticipating other distributions making the move in the near future.
Sun has always been like this. They have no real interest in open source as an ideal, or Linux as anything other than a means of marketing leverage. And lets' be honest, they've openly said as much for quite some time. Sun is out to get what they can for Sun, and they've been quite up front about that.
Of course, that doesn't mean that they won't do good things for open source along the way - their commitment to the GNOME foundation, and open sourcing StarOffice are both major contributions. Both those contributions are offered, of course, in the interests of Sun. MS is never going to port Office to Solaris, and the huge development boost StarOffice has gained in open sourcing has been great for Sun. Likewise, CDE is, in this day and age, a steaming pile of shit. Something new was needed - and if you can get that by providing a little financial support and other assistance to a group of volunteers, well, you do it.
But in a sense this is how open source has to work. Closed source companies that have no interest in open source as a philosophy can still get big gains from contributing to open source - it allows them to develop large projects that they would struggle to fund as a purely internal project. Do you really think IBM, HP et al are providing all the Linux kernel code out of the goodness of their hearts and a belief in open source? Their providing it because it helps stretch the kernel into doing the things they need it to do for their interests. In the meantime, they get all the other kernel developments everyone else supplies for free, and can focus on their own issues.
So, back to the topic - Sun isn't providing a lot of information about what really runs the JDS. Well, they're trying to make it a "Sun" product rather than another Linux flavour. Realistically I don't see it will make much difference in the long run. If the JDS is successful people will learn about what it is pieced together from one way or another.
PJ does have a point though - a little more explicit recognition that this is Linux Powered GPL software probably wouldn't go astray. I suspect you'll find that convincing Sun of that is a very hard task indeed.
Use PDF annotations, which allow users to attach notes to PDF files. They can't edit it, but they can do something effectively the same as writing handwritten comments in the margin, or attach post it notes for a real document. It is very rare that this is not a sufficient solution.
Another problem is the integration of Microsoft Outlook into the Microsoft Office suite, which is turn has its hooks into Microsoft Exchange. Without the "full monty" people aren't going to change.
Well that's always been the plan as far as MS is concerned right. Spread the interconnections and the integration so that no one element can be removed or swapped out without somehow damaging the whole. It won't be long, I'm sure, before various transition effects in PowerPoint will be handled by Windows Media Player, or something similar.
Programs like this target the mediocre kids. Smart kids just don't fall for this crap. Dumb kids happily say "I'll never download illegal stuff" and then go and download stuff because the whole concept never connects for them. Just because there are large groups of kids for which this program will fail miserably does not mean the program will not have a notable effect on a decent percentage.
I wouldn't be too quick to say that this sort of thing will fail - programs like this can work remarkably well on a resonably large percentage.
Just look at how well fnord other schemes fnord have fnord worked.
Appalling wasn't it. Yet it was quite possible to make a good film pout of that. Likewise Resident Evil - terrible piece of crap, but there was good potential. The problem seems to be the directors and production crews that take up/get handed these films to make. Personally I think the problem is that the sort of directors/writers who take on these projects are people who love video games, and they are too close to the game to step back and rewrite/reorganise things to properly work as a film - and the sort of writers and directors who would make a good film aren't interested in such projects.
Everytime I have made an excursion into the Linux desktop, I have found it to be missing one or two things I really need, then boot back into Windows and find it. If Linux is always following Windows in features, they there is no incentive to swtich.
This is common - what you are not doing is taking the time to learn the new and different features that Linux provides. You are using Windows as your yardstick, and anything that fits outside that shape, any features, or ways of doing things that aren't equivalent to Windows, you are simply cutting off and ignoring. That means all you see is the things Linux doesn't have. What you are not seeing, of course, is all the things Windows doesn't have. After using Linux desktops for quite some time I now find myself frustrated by all the things that Windows doesn't have, and find myself going back to Linux to find them.
This of course, doesn't mean you should convert to Linux - it would seem that Windows works well for you, and fulfills all your needs happily. What it does mean is that your opinion and avluation of the Linux desktop is worthless. It's like a chicken farmer going to dairy farm and complaining about the lack of henhouses, and pointing out that you'll never get good egg output this way.
Jedidiah.
Re:Won't grandma be surprised
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GNOME for Grandma
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· Score: 5, Informative
when she finds out that this revolutionary idea of opening a new window for each folder is one of the first features users turned off in windows 95
Yes, but unfortunately there is more to a proper spatial interface than simply opening another window for each folder. Microsoft's implementation was very simplistic and failed to implement the atttribute preserving properties, and general "window as a folder" paradigm that spatial interfaces are all about.
I'm not a huge fan of spatial navigation - I don't think it's that great without some useful systems to make sure the window managment is easy (and note that the GNOME version has many of those, while the MS Windows version did not - another serious difference in usability right there) - but to compare a well implemented spatial interface with the very broken, half implemented system Windows used is pointless. The Windows95-2k "open folder in new window" scheme never grasped the key points of a spatial interface, it just aped roughly what Macs did.
Just because windows created a very bad, half assed version of the idea doesn't mean the idea is bad, merely that the MS implementation sucked.
How do you think these people would feel about Windows being bundlied with Microsoft Office, Microsoft Photoshop, Microsoft Quake, Microsoft NERO, Microsoft ZoneAlarm, and Microsoft AntiVirus?
There are 2 glaring differences between Redhat bundling Openoffice, Gimp, games, whatever the current CD burner of choice is, etc. and MS doing the bundling you suggest above.
(1) Redhat does not have an effective monopoly. Anyone not interested in the products they are bundling will have little trouble finding a different distribution that bundles something else (or nothing at all - LFS for instance).
(2) Redhat doesn't own any of that software - there is plenty of competition as to what gets bundled in with distros. Certainly, right now, OpenOffice and Gimp lead their respective fields, but that doesn't mean adobe couldn't port photoshop and negotiate a deal for Redhat to bundle that instead of the Gimp, or MS to port MS Office, and do likewise. If Microsoft started bundling Micorsoft Office with Windows, I think you'd find hell would freeze over before a competing product got bundled instead, regardless of comparative quality.
Umm, one window per folder = spatial folders. Windows explorer has the panes with the tree on one side and the contents on the other and when you click on things they open in the same window.
I believe the grandparent was referring to the mode available in Win95-98 and WinNT that opened a new window for each folder. This was not a sptial system, merely a scheme that opened new windows all over the place. A spatial scheme implies the existence of other attributes (only 1 view/window for any folder, and that view retains all properties (size, position, view-stle etc.). The Windows semi-spatial system didn't properly implement all of this, and was certainly that much the worse for it. My understanding is that that scheme has been dumped for WindowsXP, which now uses the explorer interface only.
In your example there is a distinction There is nothing to stop you from liciencing the windows source code from microsoft and creating a competititive product.
That doesn't get your product automatically included in any Windows install, which is what the bundling part is all about. We're not talking about access to APIs here, we're talking about automatic access to your install base.
There is a difference between OS and brand though. If Redhat somehow gained an effective monopoly on desktops (that's not just 90% market share - that's barriers to switching on the same level that MS has), I would expect to see them get in trouble if they started bundling Redhat Media Player with all their installs in a way that is not easily removed (which is not a trivial task given how easy linux distriutions are to disassemble into requisite parts).
Except even then OSS tends to have a big difference - for the most part the distributions don't really write that much that they own, mostly just installers and config tools. They contribute a lot of code to various projects, but they don't own any of those projects. A distributions major task is to collect and organise the mass of availale software out there into a coherent package.
It was certainly an interesting decision, but ultimately pretty stupid. Given that OEM's can ship a machine with media player hidden, it doesn't really matter whether MS produce a version without it. If I was MS, I would simply produce a version that costs more than the WMP integrated version.
The EU decision prohibits that. Microsoft is not allowed to add artificial incentive to the WMP bundled version of Windows - that was part of the ruling. The WMP version must be cheaper than the bundled version (How much cheaper was not specified, so I suspect effectively the same price is what will result).
The real difference with the hiding option is that, in practice, you are still paying MS for IE and WMP because they are still getting installed. Surely those products has considerable development cost and hence considerable value to MS. If they aren't effectively charging for them when they charge for Windows, then something is astray. Truth is that you are paying fr them when you pay for Windows.
Of course, to be fair, you're also paying for the Xbox - MS is taking a beating on that line but have enough income from the Windows and Office lines to subsidise the losses.
It's an interesting dilemma, and I can't really see that the solution is all that obvious - but the opportunity to have a modular Windows, at the same level that Linux is modular (look at how different distributions are given the same available resources to pull from, let alone rlling things yourself), is a very interesting and exciting one to me. I doubt that will ever happen though.
But as of Windows XP SP1, while the components might be physically present on the hard disk, you can block access to them. You can do this as part of the installation in a SIF file, or post installation using the "Set Program Access and Defaults" button. This can be used to (for instance) configure a new default Internet browser (I use Firefox), a new default mail client and a new media player. If you use the "hide" option, the applications are simply not available to the user. I use this in corporate environments to prevent access to Outlook Express
And you can lay very high odds indeed that that functionality is almost entirely due to the first antitrust case. Had that case not gone ahead I very much doubt that Microsoft would be offering such functions. And in the end you still have to have them installed.
I think the european decision was interesting - they have to produce a version of Windows with no WMP, so that OEMs can bundle whatever they prefer instead, or if they want, they can get and bundle WMP. Under such a situation, it would be interesting to see what media players the OEMs choose to add to a Windows install.
Is there anything that Microsoft has been sued for "illegally integrating" that a Linux distribution or Mac would be caught dead without? Monopoly or no monopoly, a modern OS requires an internet browser and a video player.
I believe the difference is thus: If you are installing MS Windows you must also install IE, and WMP, and all their other knicknacks. You can't remove them either. That means if an OEM wants to ship a PC with MS Windows on it, they have to ship a PC with IE and WMP on it. At best they can include some other programs as well, but IE and WMP are required to be there. Given that MS Windows has 90% desktop share, that means effectively on any new computer, you have to have IE and WMP installed. That's where leveraging a monopoly (which is the bad part) comes in.
On the other hand, were Linux to even have an effective monopoly, what is getting forced in the install? Does a distro have to install mplayer, or xine, or totem? Is there any requirement that Mozilla, or Firebird, or Konqueror, or Opera, or Galeon or Epiphany be the installed browser? Those choices are up to the distribution - or the OEM if they want to roll their own. Yes, you have to install a media player and a web browser these days on any modern OS install - the question is, do you get to choose which one to install, or are you forced to install some out of necessity?
If Mplayer slid downhill while Totem got th Gstreamer backend going and improved massively is it likely that Distributions might move to having Gstreamer instead of Mplayer? Yes. Would this be hard to do? No.
If Windows Media Player started to lag in development while quicktime, or helixplayer shot ahead, would OEMs be able to install the better media player instead of WMP? No - at best they could install it alongside, and hope that WMP doesn't have some hardcoded stuff that pulls it up for certain actions (hey, IE certainly does!).
What we're saying here is that there is no level playing field for these apps on MS Windows. Were Linux to be in the same position, doing the sort of bundling it does now, which media player, or web browser, or office suite gets bundled would be entirely up for grabs. It's an open market on Linux. On MS Windows it's whatever MS has, plus possibly some competition bundled alongside.
That's a big difference in a competeive market with narrow margins.
Nobody has shown any such thing -- as far an anyone knows, DLP over elliptic curves is easy, but still hard over the integers mod primes.
However, the best *known* algorithms for solving DLP over elliptic curves are exponential-time (this may change, if more is learned about elliptic curves), while in the integers case they are subexponential-time. This makes a big difference in key lengths when you get down to implementations.
Quite true - that's why I said effectively. Given current techniques for solving the DLP over a finite group, elliptic curve groups offer the most robust class of groups. Given new techniques to attack the problem, yes, that could esily be reversed.
Perhaps I should have been more specific and said that it maximises the difficulty of current techniques.
That and they're only finding collisions. Collisions are next to useless unless you want somebody to accidentally download a file with seemingly random bits instead of something they wanted. (That's just one example, but collisions are not very useful a good 99.99999999% of the time).
That would be hash collisions you are thinking of, this is rather different, given the nature of the system. I would direct you to this very well written post, which explains the significance of collisions in ECC. It effectively breaks the system.
Basically it's a cryptographic method that allows the same or nearly the same level of security as a regular public-key encryption scheme(based on factoring large numbers) but makes it computationally cheaper to encrypt the data.
Mostly right. ECC is based on the Discrete Log Problem, not factoring. The Discrete Log Problem is basically: given x, y find g such that g^x = y. That's easy for real numbers - you just take a log. The problem becomes rather more difficult in the case where you are working with integers mod some prime - that is, find an integer g, such that g^x mod p = y. That gives you Diffie-Hellman and El-Gamal. ECC is the same problem, but over the group of points of an elliptic curve over a finite field. You can show that this class of groups effectively maximises the difficulty of the Discrete Log Problem, and that's why the key sizes and computational efficiency is so much better.
The most widely used assymetric system is RSA, which is indeed based on factoring (or calculating the Euler Phi function - it amounts to the same thing).
Next on the list is Diffie-Hellman, which just a key exchange algorithm (you can't encrypt with it, it simply allows both parties to communiccate in public to agree on a private session key. RSA is slow enough that this is all RSA gets used for mostly anyway though (agreeing on a symmetric session key). Diffie-Hellman is based on the difficulty of the discrete logarothm problem. That is, given a large prime p, and a numbers x, y find a such that a^x mod p = y.
If you want to do encryption with a Diffie-Hellman liem system, you can, and that system is known as El-Gamal. It works very similarly, and is based on the same problem (Discrete Log Problem).
Elliptic Curve Cryptography is simply Diffie-Hellman or El-Gamal, except that instead of using Z_p as the group in which you do calculations, you use the group formed by the points of an elliptic curve over a given finite field. Mostly that means that multiplication is much more complicated, and the Discrete Log Problem itself becomes much harder (partly due to multiplication being harder, partly due to other properties of the group that it would be tedious and not very illuminating to explain).
The advantage of Elliptic Curve systems is that because the DLP is much harder on the group used (elliptic curve group), you can use a much smaller key size and still have strong encryption. Note that it was only a 109bit key that was cracked after years of effort - compare that to the RSA factoring challenge where much larger key sizes have been cracked.
You have extra benefits in ECC as well - you get to choose the base field, and the curve itself to determine the group, rather than picking a large prime. As the properties of elliptic curve groups can vary dramatically given a change in field or curve this means if you can choose your curve randomly you get even more security (for very few extra bits - elliptic curves are very complicated objects, but simple to describe).
What all of that means is that, while current systems are based on factoring (RSA), that system require slarger keys, is less secure and - given recent developments by Biham, Bernstein and the like - is looking potentially surprisingly crackable even at some of the larger key sizes. That is to say, Elliptic Curve Cryptography is very much the future of Asymmetric Cryptosystems. Being able to break this key size gives a decent benchmark of the security of current systems (which don't use randomly chosen curves yet - there are still issues with that).
That is to say - this is very important, but given the complexity and the effort involved, looks like a good sign for the security of Elliptic Curve Cryptography.
Anything by The The, e.g. Naked Self, or Mind Bomb, or Soul Mining, just a collection of songs perhaps, but they are typically well themed and transitioned, IMO
Will look into it.
Early Modest Mouse or any Arab Strap - very themey, and Recoil - BLood Lines or Unsound Methods
I have some of that too. I'd reccomend Recoil - Liquid as well.
And I might as well return the favour.
* Golden Palominoes - Dead Inside * Laibach - Laibach * Chris Connelly - Private Education, Blonde Exodus, The Ultimate Seaside companion * Brendan Perry - Eye of the Hunter * Roger Waters - anything at all really. * Porter Ricks - Porter Ricks * Front 242 - Front by Front * Machines of Loving Grace - Gilt * Dr. Kevorkian and the Suicide Machine - The Ironman * Amon Tobin - Supermodified * Dirty Three - Ocean Songs, Whatever you Love you Are * Clint Mansell - Requiem for a Dream sountrack * Harry Connick Jr. - Star Turtle * Russell Mills - Pearl and Umbra * Tori Amos - most things really * Tom Waits - Mule variations, Blood Money
Maybe it's just the genre of music that I listen to, which tends to be trip hop, down beat, etc. (Ranging around things like Massive Attack, Zero 7, Bic Runga, Hooverphonic, Morcheeba, Delerium, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, and various forms of classical music.)
Some fine choices in there. In case you haven't already, may I suggest you do whatever you can to obtain some Synaesthesia albums - same people as Delerium, but purely instrumental, and little bit darker (not heavier, just darker).
It's because most slashdot readers are windows users. Some are dual boot but get exasperated when they can't get debian or whatever to work with some 3rd party package.
It'd interesting isn't it? I have no problems installing software. I use Feodra, and I just install whatever is the the fedora repositiories, and the freshrpm repositories. No issues anywhere there. I've used debian in the past, and found it just as easy (if not easier). I'm sure almost all the other distributions are equally easy to look after.
Issues come when I decide to try and install bleeding edge software that has not been packaged yet, and hence is only available in some third party rpm, or source. That's what the "you can't install software on Linux" crowd complains about. What they really mean is "The developers who kindly release the source for every minor version as they go fail to package it up nicely for me, and I am too impatient to wait for a major release to get packaged by my distribution". In reality I rarely have issues with the bleeding edge stuff I want to use either - I simply compile from source, and manage source packages on/usr/local with stow. Yes, using stow and compiling from source is not a user friendly option - so what? It's a luxury of those who are willing to learn how - otherwise wait for you distribution to package it for you - most distributions release regularly (okay, debian doesn't, but they maintain a pretty decent and up to date unstable archive).
I buy CDs because I like to get whole albums, rather than picking individual singles. Why is that? I really enjoy albums that are a complete whole - concept albums, themed albums, whatever you care to call it. That is, I don't suffer from the "Buy a CD to get 1 or 2 popular songs, and get a whole bunch of crap" problem because I just don't buy those albums. My problem is thus: The amount of stuff out there is getting thinner and thinner.
In days gone by you could get Animals, or The Wall, and even albums that weren't that tightly bound often tended to be designed to at least have the tracks sit together as a collective whle - to have some sort of theme and order to the m aterial presented on an album. In the last 10 years or so we've The Downward Spiral, another fine concept album, and the likes of Aphex Twin, and Autechre still put together albums as if all the tracks were designed to sit next to one another, plus myriads more doing similar things. But mainstream? Anything even approaching mainstream? It's harder and harder to find anything but a random collection of singles that bear no relation to one another, that fail to hang together in any way shape or form. I have an attention span that runs longer than 5 minutes. I'd like to listen to music that is more thna just a single. I'd like to listen to an hour or so of music that has theme and progression. Why is that getting so increasingly hard to find?
Jedidiah.
Re:Viruses spread by stupidity not OS'es.
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Linux in Canada
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· Score: 1
This should solve ALOT of these issues since "users" will be forced to run a Firewall and a Virus Scanner. It even makes sure it's upto date. This way the latest worm can hit you, all the Virus Companys release a patch boom... most of the Windows XP SP2 users are safe.
Only if the patch spreads faster than the virus - and remember, the virus gets a head start (especially if it uses spam networks to get started as some of the previous efforts have).
Anti virus software is nice, and it certainly minimises the effects, but it is far from an answer to the problem. What is needed is a much more comprehensive system to seal off viruses. That's what SELinux and it's isolation and least privilege model helps provide. There is no comparison between it, and having slightly faster updates of your virus definition files.
Slashdot Mirror
They would think that because all background images on kdelook.org have a license - check for yourself, it's a requirement when you submit to give a license for the image. A Creative Commons license prohibits commercial use without the author's consent. That license was applied as of April 24. What the license was prior to that is up for debate - but if it was on kdelook.org it was not under default copyright as claimed - it was under some license, be that GPL, public Domain, Perl Artistic License, MPL or what have you. As others have stated - depending on what that previous license was, Linspire are wither perfectly okay, or copyright infringing bastards. Until we know what the previous license was, we shouldn't leap to judgement.
Jedidiah
Yeah, this is a simple matter of lacking time.
Thanks. I was aware that writing and implementing a default policy that was going to work well is a non trivial task - I wasn't aware how far they had progressed with that. It soudns like enough people had prolems with the policy settings etc. in Test2 that it is being delayed. As long as it is going to be folded in properly once all the quirks have been sorted out I'm happy.
Jedidiah.
Anyone know exactly what the issues with SELinux by default were? Having SELinux, or something equivalent system using the LSM kernel module as a default is the way that Linux should e heading - it would dramatically increase the security of Linux systems. I was looking forward to Fedora Core 2 being the first to include it by default, and anticipating other distributions making the move in the near future.
Jedidiah.
Sun has always been like this. They have no real interest in open source as an ideal, or Linux as anything other than a means of marketing leverage. And lets' be honest, they've openly said as much for quite some time. Sun is out to get what they can for Sun, and they've been quite up front about that.
Of course, that doesn't mean that they won't do good things for open source along the way - their commitment to the GNOME foundation, and open sourcing StarOffice are both major contributions. Both those contributions are offered, of course, in the interests of Sun. MS is never going to port Office to Solaris, and the huge development boost StarOffice has gained in open sourcing has been great for Sun. Likewise, CDE is, in this day and age, a steaming pile of shit. Something new was needed - and if you can get that by providing a little financial support and other assistance to a group of volunteers, well, you do it.
But in a sense this is how open source has to work. Closed source companies that have no interest in open source as a philosophy can still get big gains from contributing to open source - it allows them to develop large projects that they would struggle to fund as a purely internal project. Do you really think IBM, HP et al are providing all the Linux kernel code out of the goodness of their hearts and a belief in open source? Their providing it because it helps stretch the kernel into doing the things they need it to do for their interests. In the meantime, they get all the other kernel developments everyone else supplies for free, and can focus on their own issues.
So, back to the topic - Sun isn't providing a lot of information about what really runs the JDS. Well, they're trying to make it a "Sun" product rather than another Linux flavour. Realistically I don't see it will make much difference in the long run. If the JDS is successful people will learn about what it is pieced together from one way or another.
PJ does have a point though - a little more explicit recognition that this is Linux Powered GPL software probably wouldn't go astray. I suspect you'll find that convincing Sun of that is a very hard task indeed.
Jedidiah.
Use PDF annotations, which allow users to attach notes to PDF files. They can't edit it, but they can do something effectively the same as writing handwritten comments in the margin, or attach post it notes for a real document. It is very rare that this is not a sufficient solution.
Jedidiah.
Another problem is the integration of Microsoft Outlook into the Microsoft Office suite, which is turn has its hooks into Microsoft Exchange. Without the "full monty" people aren't going to change.
Well that's always been the plan as far as MS is concerned right. Spread the interconnections and the integration so that no one element can be removed or swapped out without somehow damaging the whole. It won't be long, I'm sure, before various transition effects in PowerPoint will be handled by Windows Media Player, or something similar.
Jedidiah.
Programs like this target the mediocre kids. Smart kids just don't fall for this crap. Dumb kids happily say "I'll never download illegal stuff" and then go and download stuff because the whole concept never connects for them. Just because there are large groups of kids for which this program will fail miserably does not mean the program will not have a notable effect on a decent percentage.
I wouldn't be too quick to say that this sort of thing will fail - programs like this can work remarkably well on a resonably large percentage.
Just look at how well fnord other schemes fnord have fnord worked.
Jedidiah.
Two words: Tomb Raider
Appalling wasn't it. Yet it was quite possible to make a good film pout of that. Likewise Resident Evil - terrible piece of crap, but there was good potential. The problem seems to be the directors and production crews that take up/get handed these films to make. Personally I think the problem is that the sort of directors/writers who take on these projects are people who love video games, and they are too close to the game to step back and rewrite/reorganise things to properly work as a film - and the sort of writers and directors who would make a good film aren't interested in such projects.
Jedidiah.
Everytime I have made an excursion into the Linux desktop, I have found it to be missing one or two things I really need, then boot back into Windows and find it. If Linux is always following Windows in features, they there is no incentive to swtich.
This is common - what you are not doing is taking the time to learn the new and different features that Linux provides. You are using Windows as your yardstick, and anything that fits outside that shape, any features, or ways of doing things that aren't equivalent to Windows, you are simply cutting off and ignoring. That means all you see is the things Linux doesn't have. What you are not seeing, of course, is all the things Windows doesn't have. After using Linux desktops for quite some time I now find myself frustrated by all the things that Windows doesn't have, and find myself going back to Linux to find them.
This of course, doesn't mean you should convert to Linux - it would seem that Windows works well for you, and fulfills all your needs happily. What it does mean is that your opinion and avluation of the Linux desktop is worthless. It's like a chicken farmer going to dairy farm and complaining about the lack of henhouses, and pointing out that you'll never get good egg output this way.
Jedidiah.
when she finds out that this revolutionary idea of opening a new window for each folder is one of the first features users turned off in windows 95
Yes, but unfortunately there is more to a proper spatial interface than simply opening another window for each folder. Microsoft's implementation was very simplistic and failed to implement the atttribute preserving properties, and general "window as a folder" paradigm that spatial interfaces are all about.
I'm not a huge fan of spatial navigation - I don't think it's that great without some useful systems to make sure the window managment is easy (and note that the GNOME version has many of those, while the MS Windows version did not - another serious difference in usability right there) - but to compare a well implemented spatial interface with the very broken, half implemented system Windows used is pointless. The Windows95-2k "open folder in new window" scheme never grasped the key points of a spatial interface, it just aped roughly what Macs did.
Just because windows created a very bad, half assed version of the idea doesn't mean the idea is bad, merely that the MS implementation sucked.
Check your logic and try again.
Jedidiah.
How do you think these people would feel about Windows being bundlied with Microsoft Office, Microsoft Photoshop, Microsoft Quake, Microsoft NERO, Microsoft ZoneAlarm, and Microsoft AntiVirus?
There are 2 glaring differences between Redhat bundling Openoffice, Gimp, games, whatever the current CD burner of choice is, etc. and MS doing the bundling you suggest above.
(1) Redhat does not have an effective monopoly. Anyone not interested in the products they are bundling will have little trouble finding a different distribution that bundles something else (or nothing at all - LFS for instance).
(2) Redhat doesn't own any of that software - there is plenty of competition as to what gets bundled in with distros. Certainly, right now, OpenOffice and Gimp lead their respective fields, but that doesn't mean adobe couldn't port photoshop and negotiate a deal for Redhat to bundle that instead of the Gimp, or MS to port MS Office, and do likewise. If Microsoft started bundling Micorsoft Office with Windows, I think you'd find hell would freeze over before a competing product got bundled instead, regardless of comparative quality.
Jedidiah.
Umm, one window per folder = spatial folders. Windows explorer has the panes with the tree on one side and the contents on the other and when you click on things they open in the same window.
I believe the grandparent was referring to the mode available in Win95-98 and WinNT that opened a new window for each folder. This was not a sptial system, merely a scheme that opened new windows all over the place. A spatial scheme implies the existence of other attributes (only 1 view/window for any folder, and that view retains all properties (size, position, view-stle etc.). The Windows semi-spatial system didn't properly implement all of this, and was certainly that much the worse for it. My understanding is that that scheme has been dumped for WindowsXP, which now uses the explorer interface only.
Jedidiah.
In your example there is a distinction There is nothing to stop you from liciencing the windows source code from microsoft and creating a competititive product.
That doesn't get your product automatically included in any Windows install, which is what the bundling part is all about. We're not talking about access to APIs here, we're talking about automatic access to your install base.
There is a difference between OS and brand though. If Redhat somehow gained an effective monopoly on desktops (that's not just 90% market share - that's barriers to switching on the same level that MS has), I would expect to see them get in trouble if they started bundling Redhat Media Player with all their installs in a way that is not easily removed (which is not a trivial task given how easy linux distriutions are to disassemble into requisite parts).
Except even then OSS tends to have a big difference - for the most part the distributions don't really write that much that they own, mostly just installers and config tools. They contribute a lot of code to various projects, but they don't own any of those projects. A distributions major task is to collect and organise the mass of availale software out there into a coherent package.
Jedidiah.
It was certainly an interesting decision, but ultimately pretty stupid. Given that OEM's can ship a machine with media player hidden, it doesn't really matter whether MS produce a version without it. If I was MS, I would simply produce a version that costs more than the WMP integrated version.
The EU decision prohibits that. Microsoft is not allowed to add artificial incentive to the WMP bundled version of Windows - that was part of the ruling. The WMP version must be cheaper than the bundled version (How much cheaper was not specified, so I suspect effectively the same price is what will result).
The real difference with the hiding option is that, in practice, you are still paying MS for IE and WMP because they are still getting installed. Surely those products has considerable development cost and hence considerable value to MS. If they aren't effectively charging for them when they charge for Windows, then something is astray. Truth is that you are paying fr them when you pay for Windows.
Of course, to be fair, you're also paying for the Xbox - MS is taking a beating on that line but have enough income from the Windows and Office lines to subsidise the losses.
It's an interesting dilemma, and I can't really see that the solution is all that obvious - but the opportunity to have a modular Windows, at the same level that Linux is modular (look at how different distributions are given the same available resources to pull from, let alone rlling things yourself), is a very interesting and exciting one to me. I doubt that will ever happen though.
Jedidiah.
But as of Windows XP SP1, while the components might be physically present on the hard disk, you can block access to them. You can do this as part of the installation in a SIF file, or post installation using the "Set Program Access and Defaults" button. This can be used to (for instance) configure a new default Internet browser (I use Firefox), a new default mail client and a new media player. If you use the "hide" option, the applications are simply not available to the user. I use this in corporate environments to prevent access to Outlook Express
And you can lay very high odds indeed that that functionality is almost entirely due to the first antitrust case. Had that case not gone ahead I very much doubt that Microsoft would be offering such functions. And in the end you still have to have them installed.
I think the european decision was interesting - they have to produce a version of Windows with no WMP, so that OEMs can bundle whatever they prefer instead, or if they want, they can get and bundle WMP. Under such a situation, it would be interesting to see what media players the OEMs choose to add to a Windows install.
Jedidiah.
Is there anything that Microsoft has been sued for "illegally integrating" that a Linux distribution or Mac would be caught dead without? Monopoly or no monopoly, a modern OS requires an internet browser and a video player.
I believe the difference is thus: If you are installing MS Windows you must also install IE, and WMP, and all their other knicknacks. You can't remove them either. That means if an OEM wants to ship a PC with MS Windows on it, they have to ship a PC with IE and WMP on it. At best they can include some other programs as well, but IE and WMP are required to be there. Given that MS Windows has 90% desktop share, that means effectively on any new computer, you have to have IE and WMP installed. That's where leveraging a monopoly (which is the bad part) comes in.
On the other hand, were Linux to even have an effective monopoly, what is getting forced in the install? Does a distro have to install mplayer, or xine, or totem? Is there any requirement that Mozilla, or Firebird, or Konqueror, or Opera, or Galeon or Epiphany be the installed browser? Those choices are up to the distribution - or the OEM if they want to roll their own. Yes, you have to install a media player and a web browser these days on any modern OS install - the question is, do you get to choose which one to install, or are you forced to install some out of necessity?
If Mplayer slid downhill while Totem got th Gstreamer backend going and improved massively is it likely that Distributions might move to having Gstreamer instead of Mplayer? Yes. Would this be hard to do? No.
If Windows Media Player started to lag in development while quicktime, or helixplayer shot ahead, would OEMs be able to install the better media player instead of WMP? No - at best they could install it alongside, and hope that WMP doesn't have some hardcoded stuff that pulls it up for certain actions (hey, IE certainly does!).
What we're saying here is that there is no level playing field for these apps on MS Windows. Were Linux to be in the same position, doing the sort of bundling it does now, which media player, or web browser, or office suite gets bundled would be entirely up for grabs. It's an open market on Linux. On MS Windows it's whatever MS has, plus possibly some competition bundled alongside.
That's a big difference in a competeive market with narrow margins.
Jedidiah.
Nobody has shown any such thing -- as far an anyone knows, DLP over elliptic curves is easy, but still hard over the integers mod primes.
However, the best *known* algorithms for solving DLP over elliptic curves are exponential-time (this may change, if more is learned about elliptic curves), while in the integers case they are subexponential-time. This makes a big difference in key lengths when you get down to implementations.
Quite true - that's why I said effectively. Given current techniques for solving the DLP over a finite group, elliptic curve groups offer the most robust class of groups. Given new techniques to attack the problem, yes, that could esily be reversed.
Perhaps I should have been more specific and said that it maximises the difficulty of current techniques.
Apologies for confusion.
Jedidiah.
That and they're only finding collisions. Collisions are next to useless unless you want somebody to accidentally download a file with seemingly random bits instead of something they wanted. (That's just one example, but collisions are not very useful a good 99.99999999% of the time).
That would be hash collisions you are thinking of, this is rather different, given the nature of the system. I would direct you to this very well written post, which explains the significance of collisions in ECC. It effectively breaks the system.
Jedidiah.
Basically it's a cryptographic method that allows the same or nearly the same level of security as a regular public-key encryption scheme(based on factoring large numbers) but makes it computationally cheaper to encrypt the data.
Mostly right. ECC is based on the Discrete Log Problem, not factoring. The Discrete Log Problem is basically: given x, y find g such that g^x = y. That's easy for real numbers - you just take a log. The problem becomes rather more difficult in the case where you are working with integers mod some prime - that is, find an integer g, such that g^x mod p = y. That gives you Diffie-Hellman and El-Gamal. ECC is the same problem, but over the group of points of an elliptic curve over a finite field. You can show that this class of groups effectively maximises the difficulty of the Discrete Log Problem, and that's why the key sizes and computational efficiency is so much better.
Jedidiah
The most widely used assymetric system is RSA, which is indeed based on factoring (or calculating the Euler Phi function - it amounts to the same thing).
Next on the list is Diffie-Hellman, which just a key exchange algorithm (you can't encrypt with it, it simply allows both parties to communiccate in public to agree on a private session key. RSA is slow enough that this is all RSA gets used for mostly anyway though (agreeing on a symmetric session key). Diffie-Hellman is based on the difficulty of the discrete logarothm problem. That is, given a large prime p, and a numbers x, y find a such that a^x mod p = y.
If you want to do encryption with a Diffie-Hellman liem system, you can, and that system is known as El-Gamal. It works very similarly, and is based on the same problem (Discrete Log Problem).
Elliptic Curve Cryptography is simply Diffie-Hellman or El-Gamal, except that instead of using Z_p as the group in which you do calculations, you use the group formed by the points of an elliptic curve over a given finite field. Mostly that means that multiplication is much more complicated, and the Discrete Log Problem itself becomes much harder (partly due to multiplication being harder, partly due to other properties of the group that it would be tedious and not very illuminating to explain).
The advantage of Elliptic Curve systems is that because the DLP is much harder on the group used (elliptic curve group), you can use a much smaller key size and still have strong encryption. Note that it was only a 109bit key that was cracked after years of effort - compare that to the RSA factoring challenge where much larger key sizes have been cracked.
You have extra benefits in ECC as well - you get to choose the base field, and the curve itself to determine the group, rather than picking a large prime. As the properties of elliptic curve groups can vary dramatically given a change in field or curve this means if you can choose your curve randomly you get even more security (for very few extra bits - elliptic curves are very complicated objects, but simple to describe).
What all of that means is that, while current systems are based on factoring (RSA), that system require slarger keys, is less secure and - given recent developments by Biham, Bernstein and the like - is looking potentially surprisingly crackable even at some of the larger key sizes. That is to say, Elliptic Curve Cryptography is very much the future of Asymmetric Cryptosystems. Being able to break this key size gives a decent benchmark of the security of current systems (which don't use randomly chosen curves yet - there are still issues with that).
That is to say - this is very important, but given the complexity and the effort involved, looks like a good sign for the security of Elliptic Curve Cryptography.
Jedidiah.
well constructed sound tracks
* Run Lola Run (Lola Rennt)
* Pi
* Heat
Own them.
Anything by The The, e.g. Naked Self, or Mind Bomb, or Soul Mining, just a collection of songs perhaps, but they are typically well themed and transitioned, IMO
Will look into it.
Early Modest Mouse or any Arab Strap - very themey, and Recoil - BLood Lines or Unsound Methods
I have some of that too. I'd reccomend Recoil - Liquid as well.
And I might as well return the favour.
* Golden Palominoes - Dead Inside
* Laibach - Laibach
* Chris Connelly - Private Education, Blonde Exodus, The Ultimate Seaside companion
* Brendan Perry - Eye of the Hunter
* Roger Waters - anything at all really.
* Porter Ricks - Porter Ricks
* Front 242 - Front by Front
* Machines of Loving Grace - Gilt
* Dr. Kevorkian and the Suicide Machine - The Ironman
* Amon Tobin - Supermodified
* Dirty Three - Ocean Songs, Whatever you Love you Are
* Clint Mansell - Requiem for a Dream sountrack
* Harry Connick Jr. - Star Turtle
* Russell Mills - Pearl and Umbra
* Tori Amos - most things really
* Tom Waits - Mule variations, Blood Money
HTH
Jedidiah
Maybe it's just the genre of music that I listen to, which tends to be trip hop, down beat, etc. (Ranging around things like Massive Attack, Zero 7, Bic Runga, Hooverphonic, Morcheeba, Delerium, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, and various forms of classical music.)
Some fine choices in there. In case you haven't already, may I suggest you do whatever you can to obtain some Synaesthesia albums - same people as Delerium, but purely instrumental, and little bit darker (not heavier, just darker).
Jedidiah.
It's because most slashdot readers are windows users. Some are dual boot but get exasperated when they can't get debian or whatever to work with some 3rd party package.
/usr/local with stow. Yes, using stow and compiling from source is not a user friendly option - so what? It's a luxury of those who are willing to learn how - otherwise wait for you distribution to package it for you - most distributions release regularly (okay, debian doesn't, but they maintain a pretty decent and up to date unstable archive).
It'd interesting isn't it? I have no problems installing software. I use Feodra, and I just install whatever is the the fedora repositiories, and the freshrpm repositories. No issues anywhere there. I've used debian in the past, and found it just as easy (if not easier). I'm sure almost all the other distributions are equally easy to look after.
Issues come when I decide to try and install bleeding edge software that has not been packaged yet, and hence is only available in some third party rpm, or source. That's what the "you can't install software on Linux" crowd complains about. What they really mean is "The developers who kindly release the source for every minor version as they go fail to package it up nicely for me, and I am too impatient to wait for a major release to get packaged by my distribution". In reality I rarely have issues with the bleeding edge stuff I want to use either - I simply compile from source, and manage source packages on
[/rant]
Jedidiah
I buy CDs because I like to get whole albums, rather than picking individual singles. Why is that? I really enjoy albums that are a complete whole - concept albums, themed albums, whatever you care to call it. That is, I don't suffer from the "Buy a CD to get 1 or 2 popular songs, and get a whole bunch of crap" problem because I just don't buy those albums. My problem is thus: The amount of stuff out there is getting thinner and thinner.
In days gone by you could get Animals, or The Wall, and even albums that weren't that tightly bound often tended to be designed to at least have the tracks sit together as a collective whle - to have some sort of theme and order to the m aterial presented on an album. In the last 10 years or so we've The Downward Spiral, another fine concept album, and the likes of Aphex Twin, and Autechre still put together albums as if all the tracks were designed to sit next to one another, plus myriads more doing similar things. But mainstream? Anything even approaching mainstream? It's harder and harder to find anything but a random collection of singles that bear no relation to one another, that fail to hang together in any way shape or form. I have an attention span that runs longer than 5 minutes. I'd like to listen to music that is more thna just a single. I'd like to listen to an hour or so of music that has theme and progression. Why is that getting so increasingly hard to find?
Jedidiah.
This should solve ALOT of these issues since "users" will be forced to run a Firewall and a Virus Scanner. It even makes sure it's upto date. This way the latest worm can hit you, all the Virus Companys release a patch boom ... most of the Windows XP SP2 users are safe.
Only if the patch spreads faster than the virus - and remember, the virus gets a head start (especially if it uses spam networks to get started as some of the previous efforts have).
Anti virus software is nice, and it certainly minimises the effects, but it is far from an answer to the problem. What is needed is a much more comprehensive system to seal off viruses. That's what SELinux and it's isolation and least privilege model helps provide. There is no comparison between it, and having slightly faster updates of your virus definition files.
Jedidiah.