The AACS Licensing Authority has proposed the use of subset-difference trees with AES encryption,
That sounds nice because AES is strong by most standards (there is a theoretical attack that is faster than brute force, but only very marginally better - in reality it is jst as impractical). The catch is that you still have to decrypt the content at the client end for viewing. Unless you include unique serial numbers in the packaging that the user has to input each time (yeah right), or require the DVD player to be internet connected and download keys, the key has to be on the DVD. From there it's just a matter (okay, not simple, but still) of reverse engineering the unlocking procedure to find where/how it gets/decrypts the necessary key, and we're back where we started.
Personally I loathe DVD encryption just for the region encoding alone. I used to travel a lot (and may well do a lot more travelling in future), so my DVD collection is a hopeless mess of different regions. Worse, when living in the Asia-Pacific region there were any number of interesting DVDs that simply weren't released there (usually more obscure art-house films). The only solution was to order them from overseas...
region encoding is silly. It's supposed to protect film distributors who distribute their films at ifferent times to different markets - but with the ever growing popularity of simultaneous worldwide releases (or releases separated by weeks at most) that isn't a very relevant argument. Instead it is being used to provide regional DVD distributors with a monopoly so they can price gouge.
Enlightenment is competing fr a different market than GNOME and KDE. It's more in line to compete with XFCE and even *box. The new E is suprisingly fast, and as such provides a reasonably "fast light desktop" option. At the same time, however, the new E is incredibly rich in eye candy - way more so than any of the competing light desktops. Add to that configurabilty - which E doesn't have yet, it's still early days - which you can be sure E will get, and well...
Shop around, and you can find an OEM DX 9 card with 256 MB DDR RAM for around $90 US. Tell me how you get your "open hardware" card on the market at a price anyone will be willing to pay.
Because as we all know, all those Linux and BSD users out there are all desperate for a DX 9 card.
There are people who are willing to pay a margin to get a card that is guaranteed to work out of the box with Linux and BSD, with drivers that get the most out of the card, and hackable firmware.
I never claimed there were a lot of people. I only claimed that there didn't need to be a lot - only enough to sustain a small company such as this one. I suspect there may well be.
But a 3D card? You are going to make a card to run the latest Quake and Doom? Or even release back of the games? Do you realize how much time, how many thousands of man hours go into these cards? The dollar amount for the simulators, the fabs to make the prototypes, etc
I don't think there's any requirement for it to be cutting edge. They just said "3D support", not "runs Doom3 at fast as the latest nVidia or ATI card". For a lot of people a card that was capable of running say Quake3 at reasonable (but not necessarily blindingly fast) frame rates would be quite sufficient. Not everyone gets 3D support on a card for gaming purposes, and for those people an open card that provides credible 3D support may be an attractive option.
Sure, you won't compete with ATI and nVidia, but then guaranteed open source drivers that will get the maximum performance out of the card are quite a benefit in themselves. Especially given the quality of ATIs Linux drivers.
There is a market for this card. No it isn't a huge market, but then Apple doesn't have a huge chunk of the desktop market, but they seem to be rolling along fine. As long as there is a big enough niche to support to company, that's all they need. More power to them.
Sez you. Now go get a bid from IBM or EDS for managing your desktop environment with 6 different platforms. I guarantee that it will come in way way way over the Windows bid.
Sorry, the network in your mom's basement does not remotely represent a huge desktop deployment.
Who said anything about 6 different Desktops? I mentioned 2, OS X and Linux, and those two were well divided with regard to role. It is hardly a big ask to maintain developer/research desktops separately to corporate desktops. You can give the corporate desktop to [anyone but EDS], and run the developer desktop bid separately. The important point is division according to role - it hardly matters if the corporate and developer desktops aren't in line. As for maintaining the servers - that's what Sun service contracts are for.
Man, I didn't like Highlander 2 as much as the next guy, but the article summary was kick in the nuts out of nowhere. Isn't there a statute of limitations on crappy movies? Does a time ever come when we can forgive them?
There is no reason to forgive it. I am quite positive they never made any sequels to Highlander.
Head over the the NSA and read some of their papers about SELinux, and what it was intended for. It was not intended to be the ultimate secure OS. If you read between the lines, its mre like a bunch of NSA people got so pissed off with the current complete lack of security in commercially available OSs, so grabbed Linux and hacked in Mandatory Access Controls without any real difficulty and turned it back to the community as a demonstration to say "See, it isn't so damn hard to make things a lot more secure".
I wouldn't make any bets as to whether the NSA themselves make a lot of use of SELinux. They won't really tell you what they use. They do certainly know alot about writing secure OS code though, considering how fast they managed to put SELinux together.
Random fact: The NSA web site has never been hacked or defaced. The CIA, FBI, the White House etc. have all been hacked, even if it is rarely and briefly. The NSA... never. You can't tell me it's for lack of trying.
Who says the alternatives didn't crap out before they made it off the paper?
It's not hard for the Air Force to say: "We are sick of issues with MS, but even a provisional look at alternatives, significantly [list of alternatives considered here] were all considered, but were not viable."
That pretty much clears them, takes no effort whatsoever, and is rather surprising they didn't say as much if they did put any consideration into alternatives.
More importantly, what's wrong with a mixed shop based on requirements of the tasks. What's wrong with running Sun for your mission critical servers, NetBSD for your web and mail servers, OS X for basic business/management desktops, Linux for developer and research desktops etc. All of those will play together quite happily. It's only when you try to throw MS Windows into a heterogeneous mix that things start having issues.
Throw out Windows, and everyone else will play nice together. Seems pretty obvious as to who should go in any hetrogeneous environment.
It's worth noting that massive amount of Air Force computing needs are not "critical shit". There are an awful lot of desktop machines running basic office apps to fill in reports in triplicate, make requisititons, do accounting, and all the other "needs" of any bureaucratic system.
That such problems can't be readily addressed by a nice locked down desktop distro (anything from Novell desktop 9 to Sun's Java Desktop) using OpenOffice and the like, well that's certainly up for debate. When the claim to be fed up with MS it is a little odd that they didn't even bother to evaluate the competition.
For all those out there who will say "But Linux isn't good enough on the desktop", or "OpenOffice is no replacement for MS Office", I would point out that both Linux and OpenOffice can be perfectly serviceable in some situations; Why didn't the Air Force at least evaluate these products to see if their situation was one in which they would work?
Where is the tool that allows me to change the format as I like? Every TeX article I read basically says, "If you don't like it, you're wrong." Certainly not a very user-friendly attitude to have.
It's actually very easy if you're willing to learn a little TeX. For those that aren't, I'm surprised no solutions have been made available. I'e written a small Gnome app tht lets you do basic drag and drop design for presentation templates and will output a LaTeX documentclass. It isn't quite at release quality yet, but I'm not much of a programmer and I had no real difficulty writing it.
Jedidiah.
Re:If the issue is forged passports
on
Tin Foil Passports?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Really the people don't need to know or understand the crypto. They just need to be told that a lot of very smart people made sure that you can't fake a passport and still have the green "verified" symbol show up when you get checked. You'd be surprised how many people aren't interested in asking "why?", or "really, how?" when told "it works, trust me" as long as the person saying "trust me" is the government.
And what of all the people who don't trust the governments word? Well the paranoid are exactly the people that will know and understand the crypto, so it's not a problem.
I think the real issue is that it would actually involve real change, and odds on if they did do it they'd make a complete mess of the crypto used, there would be outcries from those in the know, and everyone else would just blindly assume it worked perfectly.
Jedidiah.
Re:what happens if the private key is compramised?
on
Tin Foil Passports?
·
· Score: 1
Sure, and people will always be stupid. The passports get invalidated, and if everyone in a given country has to get their passport reissued they'll be pissed off. If it happens more than once they'll vote in someone with more sense. Well, hopefully they would. You can never tell with some countries.
Jedidiah.
Re:what happens if the private key is compramised?
on
Tin Foil Passports?
·
· Score: 1
are you suddenly faced with several billion passports that are no longer valid or what?
Presumably each country has it own keys, and potentially a large number of keys each. If one key gets compromised the number of passports invalidated is reduced to a manageable size. You can create a new key pair whenever you need to, so potentially a single key might only cover 10,000 people or so.
But yes, compromise of a key would be a very serious issue indeed, even with those measures. That just means that protecting the keys needs to be taken seriously. It wouldn't be hard to have large keys that won't be soon broken. And remember, most passports need to be reissued every 5 to 10 years, so you can simply roll them through to newer larger keys when they get renewed to cover increasing compute power.
Jedidiah.
If the issue is forged passports
on
Tin Foil Passports?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The what's wrong with cryptographic signing? Strong cryptography should have been used in passports a long time ago. The principle would be simple enough:
The name, photo and other information is hashed and then signed by the issuing authority. Airport checks are then a matter of verifying the signature. You can't forge a passport without the private key of the issuing country (which I presume they will guard closely), and modifying an existing passport will invalidate the signature.
The only tricky point here is photos: You can't scan the straight photo for the check because of all sorts of tricky alignment and scan quality issues, but that's what a chip might be useful for - it contains a hi res photo, along with the other data and signature. The hi-res photo from the chip is displayed on a terminal for the person checking the documents, along with signature verification.
Yes, you still have to have people checking photos. No, that isn't foolproof. But realistically it is as good as what we have now, with the added bonus that forged, faked, or munged passports will display as invalid due to the signature check. That's pretty damn good, especially when the resulting passport is no more invasive than what we have now.
Everyone needs a second chance. And a third. And a fourth. And a fifth. And a...
I'm sure the government has perfectly good reasons for continuing to hand contracts to EDS. It's just probably not a reason they want to tell you because it involves (bribery|nepotism|stupidity|all of the above)
Of course the reality is that there are practically no films at all that make a profit. Certainly every big budget film is guaranteed to make a loss. At least, according to the movie studio accountants.
And in the end that's actually a reasonably large part of where all the real profit comes from. Take a read of this and just look at all the amazing money shuffling methods they have to sweep any semblance of profit under the carpet. Just look at how the account for video and DVD sales for gods sake! Dodgy, dodgy, dodgy.
(if (parses (your brain) (things that way)) (is (lisp fun)))
To be honest mine doesn't (which is probably why the above is quite wrong), but I do know people who seem to find it far more "natural" and "readable".
I have 2.4Ghz P4, 1GB of RAM, and a GeForce 6800. D3 performance was nothing special, dipping as low as 15 FPS.
I'm running on a 2.0 GHz P4 laptop with 512MB of RAM and a paltry GeForce 4 Go, but managed to get very respectable frame rates out of D3 even at 800x600. I have no idea how HL2 would perform, but I was impressed with how well D3 scaled down (mostly with respect to the video card).
I can't quite understand why all the salesweasels think we'll jump at pay-per-use licensing. Here's a thought: I'd like to BUY my tools and OWN them, not be treated like a criminal by a vendor.
I'm just trying to imagine a self respecting Carpenter who rents his hammers, chisels and lathes only as he needs them...
Nope, my imagination just doesn't stretch that far.
Can anyone give a suggestion for the distro with the most user-friendly package management? I've worked with UNIX since the late 80's and am far more interested in using Linux as a tool to do other interesting things than having to spend time making things work.
Pretty much anything that has apt and Synaptic. That means Debian, and all its offshoots (Ubuntu is nice, and comes with Synaptic as the default package manager), but also includes Fedora (using apt-rpm), and well, pretty much anything else you can install those two apps on.
Note that Synaptic is originally from Connectiva, and very nice apt-rpm based distribution that you could always lok into.
I read your stuff before. Very interesting. I hope they'll get implemented in Metacity. Do you know the current status of window manager support for that idea?
There's been a small amount of buy in from small development window managers (that remain in fairly much "development/not usable yet" status, and as for the main WMs... I do know that it has been discussed at least to some extent in Enlightenment circles. I'm hoping to raise the issue more now that actual E17 development is starting. Otherwise, for now, it is mostly ignored. Hopefully it will get more discussion because I do think that even if my idea isn't implemented, some manner of grouping needs to be standard in WMs - it is simply too good and too powerful an idea to let go to waste.
I despair of it getting much Metacity buy in, due to the attitudes around that window manager, but perhaps I ought to try writing to the mailing list and see what happens.
The task bar on the KDE Panel automagically groups Gimp windows when the taskbar area becomes crowded...The Gnome (2.6.2) panel's window list area also does grouping. If the area is crowded, gimp windows are automatically grouped. If you want this behavior at all times, pick "Window Grouping: Always group windows" in the preferences dialog.
Nice, but not what he's talking about. Try reading this, which is my proposal for a window grouping interface to get an idea of what is being discussed. I admit that my proposal tends to lean toward power users (I felt it was better to outline all the possibilities), but the basic interface concept for how to group and basic management of the groups is, I think, quite reasonable, and all WMs ought to have something along these lines available.
Slashdot Mirror
The AACS Licensing Authority has proposed the use of subset-difference trees with AES encryption,
That sounds nice because AES is strong by most standards (there is a theoretical attack that is faster than brute force, but only very marginally better - in reality it is jst as impractical). The catch is that you still have to decrypt the content at the client end for viewing. Unless you include unique serial numbers in the packaging that the user has to input each time (yeah right), or require the DVD player to be internet connected and download keys, the key has to be on the DVD. From there it's just a matter (okay, not simple, but still) of reverse engineering the unlocking procedure to find where/how it gets/decrypts the necessary key, and we're back where we started.
Personally I loathe DVD encryption just for the region encoding alone. I used to travel a lot (and may well do a lot more travelling in future), so my DVD collection is a hopeless mess of different regions. Worse, when living in the Asia-Pacific region there were any number of interesting DVDs that simply weren't released there (usually more obscure art-house films). The only solution was to order them from overseas...
region encoding is silly. It's supposed to protect film distributors who distribute their films at ifferent times to different markets - but with the ever growing popularity of simultaneous worldwide releases (or releases separated by weeks at most) that isn't a very relevant argument. Instead it is being used to provide regional DVD distributors with a monopoly so they can price gouge.
Jedidiah.
Enlightenment is competing fr a different market than GNOME and KDE. It's more in line to compete with XFCE and even *box. The new E is suprisingly fast, and as such provides a reasonably "fast light desktop" option. At the same time, however, the new E is incredibly rich in eye candy - way more so than any of the competing light desktops. Add to that configurabilty - which E doesn't have yet, it's still early days - which you can be sure E will get, and well...
I look orward to seeng what they have to offer.
Jedidiah.
Shop around, and you can find an OEM DX 9 card with 256 MB DDR RAM for around $90 US. Tell me how you get your "open hardware" card on the market at a price anyone will be willing to pay.
Because as we all know, all those Linux and BSD users out there are all desperate for a DX 9 card.
There are people who are willing to pay a margin to get a card that is guaranteed to work out of the box with Linux and BSD, with drivers that get the most out of the card, and hackable firmware.
I never claimed there were a lot of people. I only claimed that there didn't need to be a lot - only enough to sustain a small company such as this one. I suspect there may well be.
Jedidiah.
But a 3D card? You are going to make a card to run the latest Quake and Doom? Or even release back of the games? Do you realize how much time, how many thousands of man hours go into these cards? The dollar amount for the simulators, the fabs to make the prototypes, etc
I don't think there's any requirement for it to be cutting edge. They just said "3D support", not "runs Doom3 at fast as the latest nVidia or ATI card". For a lot of people a card that was capable of running say Quake3 at reasonable (but not necessarily blindingly fast) frame rates would be quite sufficient. Not everyone gets 3D support on a card for gaming purposes, and for those people an open card that provides credible 3D support may be an attractive option.
Sure, you won't compete with ATI and nVidia, but then guaranteed open source drivers that will get the maximum performance out of the card are quite a benefit in themselves. Especially given the quality of ATIs Linux drivers.
There is a market for this card. No it isn't a huge market, but then Apple doesn't have a huge chunk of the desktop market, but they seem to be rolling along fine. As long as there is a big enough niche to support to company, that's all they need. More power to them.
Jedidiah.
Sez you. Now go get a bid from IBM or EDS for managing your desktop environment with 6 different platforms. I guarantee that it will come in way way way over the Windows bid.
Sorry, the network in your mom's basement does not remotely represent a huge desktop deployment.
Who said anything about 6 different Desktops? I mentioned 2, OS X and Linux, and those two were well divided with regard to role. It is hardly a big ask to maintain developer/research desktops separately to corporate desktops. You can give the corporate desktop to [anyone but EDS], and run the developer desktop bid separately. The important point is division according to role - it hardly matters if the corporate and developer desktops aren't in line. As for maintaining the servers - that's what Sun service contracts are for.
Jedidiah.
Man, I didn't like Highlander 2 as much as the next guy, but the article summary was kick in the nuts out of nowhere. Isn't there a statute of limitations on crappy movies? Does a time ever come when we can forgive them?
There is no reason to forgive it. I am quite positive they never made any sequels to Highlander.
Please don't ruin my carefully crafted delusions.
Jedidiah.
If they have time to say they were "fed up" with MS issues, they have the time to say they at least contemplated alternatives.
Jedidiah.
Head over the the NSA and read some of their papers about SELinux, and what it was intended for. It was not intended to be the ultimate secure OS. If you read between the lines, its mre like a bunch of NSA people got so pissed off with the current complete lack of security in commercially available OSs, so grabbed Linux and hacked in Mandatory Access Controls without any real difficulty and turned it back to the community as a demonstration to say "See, it isn't so damn hard to make things a lot more secure".
I wouldn't make any bets as to whether the NSA themselves make a lot of use of SELinux. They won't really tell you what they use. They do certainly know alot about writing secure OS code though, considering how fast they managed to put SELinux together.
Random fact: The NSA web site has never been hacked or defaced. The CIA, FBI, the White House etc. have all been hacked, even if it is rarely and briefly. The NSA... never. You can't tell me it's for lack of trying.
Jedidiah.
Who says the alternatives didn't crap out before they made it off the paper?
It's not hard for the Air Force to say: "We are sick of issues with MS, but even a provisional look at alternatives, significantly [list of alternatives considered here] were all considered, but were not viable."
That pretty much clears them, takes no effort whatsoever, and is rather surprising they didn't say as much if they did put any consideration into alternatives.
Jedidiah.
More importantly, what's wrong with a mixed shop based on requirements of the tasks. What's wrong with running Sun for your mission critical servers, NetBSD for your web and mail servers, OS X for basic business/management desktops, Linux for developer and research desktops etc. All of those will play together quite happily. It's only when you try to throw MS Windows into a heterogeneous mix that things start having issues.
Throw out Windows, and everyone else will play nice together. Seems pretty obvious as to who should go in any hetrogeneous environment.
Jedidiah
It's worth noting that massive amount of Air Force computing needs are not "critical shit". There are an awful lot of desktop machines running basic office apps to fill in reports in triplicate, make requisititons, do accounting, and all the other "needs" of any bureaucratic system.
That such problems can't be readily addressed by a nice locked down desktop distro (anything from Novell desktop 9 to Sun's Java Desktop) using OpenOffice and the like, well that's certainly up for debate. When the claim to be fed up with MS it is a little odd that they didn't even bother to evaluate the competition.
For all those out there who will say "But Linux isn't good enough on the desktop", or "OpenOffice is no replacement for MS Office", I would point out that both Linux and OpenOffice can be perfectly serviceable in some situations; Why didn't the Air Force at least evaluate these products to see if their situation was one in which they would work?
Jedidiah.
Where is the tool that allows me to change the format as I like? Every TeX article I read basically says, "If you don't like it, you're wrong." Certainly not a very user-friendly attitude to have.
It's actually very easy if you're willing to learn a little TeX. For those that aren't, I'm surprised no solutions have been made available. I'e written a small Gnome app tht lets you do basic drag and drop design for presentation templates and will output a LaTeX documentclass. It isn't quite at release quality yet, but I'm not much of a programmer and I had no real difficulty writing it.
Jedidiah.
Really the people don't need to know or understand the crypto. They just need to be told that a lot of very smart people made sure that you can't fake a passport and still have the green "verified" symbol show up when you get checked. You'd be surprised how many people aren't interested in asking "why?", or "really, how?" when told "it works, trust me" as long as the person saying "trust me" is the government.
And what of all the people who don't trust the governments word? Well the paranoid are exactly the people that will know and understand the crypto, so it's not a problem.
I think the real issue is that it would actually involve real change, and odds on if they did do it they'd make a complete mess of the crypto used, there would be outcries from those in the know, and everyone else would just blindly assume it worked perfectly.
Jedidiah.
Sure, and people will always be stupid. The passports get invalidated, and if everyone in a given country has to get their passport reissued they'll be pissed off. If it happens more than once they'll vote in someone with more sense. Well, hopefully they would. You can never tell with some countries.
Jedidiah.
are you suddenly faced with several billion passports that are no longer valid or what?
Presumably each country has it own keys, and potentially a large number of keys each. If one key gets compromised the number of passports invalidated is reduced to a manageable size. You can create a new key pair whenever you need to, so potentially a single key might only cover 10,000 people or so.
But yes, compromise of a key would be a very serious issue indeed, even with those measures. That just means that protecting the keys needs to be taken seriously. It wouldn't be hard to have large keys that won't be soon broken. And remember, most passports need to be reissued every 5 to 10 years, so you can simply roll them through to newer larger keys when they get renewed to cover increasing compute power.
Jedidiah.
The what's wrong with cryptographic signing? Strong cryptography should have been used in passports a long time ago. The principle would be simple enough:
The name, photo and other information is hashed and then signed by the issuing authority. Airport checks are then a matter of verifying the signature. You can't forge a passport without the private key of the issuing country (which I presume they will guard closely), and modifying an existing passport will invalidate the signature.
The only tricky point here is photos: You can't scan the straight photo for the check because of all sorts of tricky alignment and scan quality issues, but that's what a chip might be useful for - it contains a hi res photo, along with the other data and signature. The hi-res photo from the chip is displayed on a terminal for the person checking the documents, along with signature verification.
Yes, you still have to have people checking photos. No, that isn't foolproof. But realistically it is as good as what we have now, with the added bonus that forged, faked, or munged passports will display as invalid due to the signature check. That's pretty damn good, especially when the resulting passport is no more invasive than what we have now.
Jedidiah.
Everyone needs a second chance. And a third. And a fourth. And a fifth. And a ...
I'm sure the government has perfectly good reasons for continuing to hand contracts to EDS. It's just probably not a reason they want to tell you because it involves (bribery|nepotism|stupidity|all of the above)
Jedidiah.
Of course the reality is that there are practically no films at all that make a profit. Certainly every big budget film is guaranteed to make a loss. At least, according to the movie studio accountants.
And in the end that's actually a reasonably large part of where all the real profit comes from. Take a read of this and just look at all the amazing money shuffling methods they have to sweep any semblance of profit under the carpet. Just look at how the account for video and DVD sales for gods sake! Dodgy, dodgy, dodgy.
Jedidiah.
(if (parses (your brain) (things that way)) (is (lisp fun)))
To be honest mine doesn't (which is probably why the above is quite wrong), but I do know people who seem to find it far more "natural" and "readable".
Jedidiah.
One small note
I have 2.4Ghz P4, 1GB of RAM, and a GeForce 6800. D3 performance was nothing special, dipping as low as 15 FPS.
I'm running on a 2.0 GHz P4 laptop with 512MB of RAM and a paltry GeForce 4 Go, but managed to get very respectable frame rates out of D3 even at 800x600. I have no idea how HL2 would perform, but I was impressed with how well D3 scaled down (mostly with respect to the video card).
Jedidiah.
Personally, I don't like the idea that all of Linux depends on Linus. What if he gets hit by a bus (driven by a recently "retired" Microserf)?
Thankfully an empircal study of the results of this has already been carried out.
Jedidiah
I can't quite understand why all the salesweasels think we'll jump at pay-per-use licensing. Here's a thought: I'd like to BUY my tools and OWN them, not be treated like a criminal by a vendor.
I'm just trying to imagine a self respecting Carpenter who rents his hammers, chisels and lathes only as he needs them...
Nope, my imagination just doesn't stretch that far.
Jedidiah.
Can anyone give a suggestion for the distro with the most user-friendly package management? I've worked with UNIX since the late 80's and am far more interested in using Linux as a tool to do other interesting things than having to spend time making things work.
Pretty much anything that has apt and Synaptic. That means Debian, and all its offshoots (Ubuntu is nice, and comes with Synaptic as the default package manager), but also includes Fedora (using apt-rpm), and well, pretty much anything else you can install those two apps on.
Note that Synaptic is originally from Connectiva, and very nice apt-rpm based distribution that you could always lok into.
Jedidiah
I read your stuff before. Very interesting. I hope they'll get implemented in Metacity. Do you know the current status of window manager support for that idea?
There's been a small amount of buy in from small development window managers (that remain in fairly much "development/not usable yet" status, and as for the main WMs... I do know that it has been discussed at least to some extent in Enlightenment circles. I'm hoping to raise the issue more now that actual E17 development is starting. Otherwise, for now, it is mostly ignored. Hopefully it will get more discussion because I do think that even if my idea isn't implemented, some manner of grouping needs to be standard in WMs - it is simply too good and too powerful an idea to let go to waste.
I despair of it getting much Metacity buy in, due to the attitudes around that window manager, but perhaps I ought to try writing to the mailing list and see what happens.
Jedidiah.
The task bar on the KDE Panel automagically groups Gimp windows when the taskbar area becomes crowded...The Gnome (2.6.2) panel's window list area also does grouping. If the area is crowded, gimp windows are automatically grouped. If you want this behavior at all times, pick "Window Grouping: Always group windows" in the preferences dialog.
Nice, but not what he's talking about. Try reading this, which is my proposal for a window grouping interface to get an idea of what is being discussed. I admit that my proposal tends to lean toward power users (I felt it was better to outline all the possibilities), but the basic interface concept for how to group and basic management of the groups is, I think, quite reasonable, and all WMs ought to have something along these lines available.
Jedidiah.