Just because a security bug does not goes to a newspaper does not mean that the script kids don't get their hand in the exploit. Bugs should be common knowledge just because people should have the right to know when they are in danger.
Not publicy a security bug is like shiping explosives in a train with no marks on the box warning what they are. With the marks the people doing the transportation could take a serie of precautions to avoid the disaster, if they realy care about their lives. The same is true for software.
Shure there is 90% or more of computer users that couldn't care less about security, and that is not their fault. Microsoft make money in hiding problems under the carpet, and making hard thing looks, and I repeat LOOK, easy. Managing a computer system so it would be safe is not easy, not in UNIX and not in windows, in windows it looks like an easy task, but it isn't.
Well the bottom line is hiding problems will get people with a FALSE sense of security.
PEOPLE MUST KNOW WHEN THEY ARE IN DANGER.
-- "take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
KDE and gnome have only one standard binary, elf. What differs between the two are the libraries that they need. And for some programs you may don't even need all the libraries from gnome or KDE and in some cases you will only need the widget one (gtk for gnome and QT for KDE). -- "take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
well if every one followed your thought then the united states would probably be a colony till this days, since no one would break the laws to create a revolution.
Only a fool would think that laws are more important then moral. Here in Brasil, we have corrupt politicians that create laws to benefit a few over the goods of the majority. Those law are not created based on the morals of the people, but they are based on private goals of a few. What is the result of this? In Brasil we have two classes of law, some that are followed by the people (those are the one that follow the morals) and those there simply don't catch and people simply don't follow them.
My guess, that this is the destiny of this law. People will copy their DVDs if they could and it realy don't matter if there is a law against it. Unless of course the goverment start using police force to enforce this law by brutality.
-- "take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
Am I the only one in the slashdot that thinks that this is a compleatly nonsence??? Time-warner dying??? No more big corporations??? HA! this is ridiculous, to say the least.
It dosen't matter if we could copy DVDs as easyly as we can watch them. There will alsways be the movies and the box offices and there will always be people that will buy their movies anyway, just because they will come with nice covers and maybe a booklet with pictures and stuff. This is what happen to books, anyone can copy a book with a xerox machine. Does people do it? Yes. Does the book publishing companies died?? NO.
Will people like n'synch dye of hunger? No. A great part of their income is from selling their images to addvertise and stuff, this will still give them enought income to pay them and their producers/distributor.
People in time-warner is not fighting for their lives here, their fighting for their extra mercedes in the garage and the company jet.
-- "take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
But then you want to start using hurd or beos or who knows some new incredible new OS that was just created. Surprize no drivers for your hardware. I guess you will have to waut untill your choice is also adopted by millions more to have a closed source driver.
I think it is an outrage to buy a piece of hardware and don't have access to the specs so you can create your own driver if you want.
My only question is what the hardware manufacturer would loose if they open the specs, I am not realy asking about drivers, I only asking for SPECS, I simply want to be able to have access to what I buy. Is that ask to much in this world???
-- "take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
This is the second post I read saying somthig like "I live a 500km from any where, and I can live without a car". Cars are bad, they are bad for the environment, they are not very safe and the worst they create trafic. Most of the large cities have HUGE problems with trafic, because every single person wants to have your own car. This is simply not sane.
All that said, of course that people that lives outside of the cities, where you don't have a mass-trasportation system available should use their cars. Even people that live in the cities sould be able to use their cars, but they should do it in a sane way (like using car pools, that I believe that are more commons in the USA then here in Brasil where they almost don't exist).
-- "take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
No I didn't forgot that SSH is a protocol and IF it is implemented correctly it would be safe. But the people who implement the protocol is after all only humans and they make mistakes. With several diferent versions of ssh some of them could be broken in some way.
-- "take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
If you encode the same music twice (with diferent encoders) you will end up with two diferent files, and I am not counting the diferent ID tags. MD5summing would be almost useless, it would only indentify if two files are the same one, but the same music would have tons of diferent MD5sums making the fake "cucko" sound just one more.
-- "take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
And you even forgot that each diferent version could have diferent security problems, and if you count that some security problems only happen when you combine problems (like outlook + word) this could be a nightmare from the security point of view. -- "take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
The big problem with this discussion is that you're trying to define art. Art is not something easy to define, if not impossible.
Art can have a meaning but this is very far from defining art. What does "the gioconda" means?
In my opinion, and I repeat that MY OPINION, an artist skill should be measured in how well he can touch his audience. And once a piece of art is "out there" the meaning of it is what the people who sees it whants it to be.
Is Deckard a replicant? If you don't think so then he's not. Ridley Scotts thinks he is a replicant, that only means that Deckard is a replicant for Ridley Scott. There is no real version.
-- "take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
Well in my point of view we're fighting, not to be first, the most used and etc... but to be in the market. What I want is to be able to go out and buy a scanner or a XYZW super hiper board that makes toast with your computer and be able to know how it works and how it communicates with my computer. I want to be able to see a game that I like and buy a version of it for my favorite OS (be it linux, beos, Os/2 or even "god forbids" windows). That is my utopia, and that is what I am fighting for.
-- "take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
Correct me if I am wrong but with this kind integration, it should be easy/possible to create an interface that would allow one to create simple applications (the ones that only need the default controls like textboxes, menus, checkboxes...) independently of toolkit. -- "take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
I wish I had some moderation points to moderate this up. I usualy do not moderate up comments with score bigger then 1, but I belive that Cuthalion have touched a very important point here. A common component object model is very important. I aways hoped that since both component arquitectures (KDE and Gnome) were boh using corba they would be somewhat compatible (maybe with a compatibility object to make communication between them). But this is even greater.
Maybe there should be a separeted project to create this monster, maybe a GNUCOM, witch would have the joined teams of both projects (KPARTS and BONOBO). I am sujesting this so that, if some other Desktop enviroment could start using it, since it would be compleately independent from any other Desktop Enviroment (enlightment comes to mind). -- "take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
Shure I want a very quite computer, so I can run Qunke III at the highest volume without being disturbed by the damn fans.:-) -- "take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
Some company buys their TLD and they simply start their own root servers with what ever TLD domains that come to their head, and once one country do that some other will obviously follow. This will create a great mess, where names are regional instead of global one that we have now.:-/
-- "take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
I would love if the choice would allow me (and others) to choose to use linux instead of windows. I know that linux is not yet ready to replace the OS in the dumb user's desktops. But I do think it's ready to replace my desktop (I would only add a fault here in the printing side that must be reviewed, I am hoping that the gnome-print will bring some ligth into this area).
But the point is that I want to use linux, I fell 1000 time more confortable and more produtive with linux+gnome that in any windows machine. But many business dumbly chooses their software based in the recomendation of the MSCE guy. And then their emploees don't have the chance to choose. And in my opinion this is the gratest problem.
-- "take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
I am not here to question this benchmark, but have any one notices that this result shows how easy is to fake a result? Each of the compilers have at least one that it goes well, so let's say that I want to make a benchmark that says that gcc is the best. What I do is to do this study and then publish a lot of data or create a lot of tests that are similar to first (and maybe taking other areas in witch the gcc is good from the other graphs).
Then I publish the resulting benchmark, but don't mention the firt batery of tests or how I choosed witch test I would use.
This is also true for statistics, statistics can be used to prove/unprove almost anything. Did you know that you have 50% of chance of not dying? Yes this is true for only half of the people that ever borned had actualy died.
-- "take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
The problem is that usualy when you upgrade redhat you're also upgrading most of your software with it.
When you upgrade windows you're doing just that upgrading windows. Since Ms almost always make upgrades backward compatible, they can surely leave them untouched.
Red hat on the other hand has to deal with open source software, this means that sometime when the users/developers think that some configuration is broken they simply change the way the program is configured. When this happen red hat has 2 options leave your conf file and maybe tbreaking the program configuration or installing a new one that will work, but not as expected. Those are the files.rpmnew and.rpmorig.
I agree with you that wine is not the last nail in Ms coffin. In fact there are people that argue that the fact that OS/2 (do you remember?) ran win 3.1 applications so well was the final nail in Os/2's coffin, since companies thought "if os/2 users can run my software now, why would I port it?". Could wine turn into this? I don't know, linux has today more power than Os/2 ever had. Many software houses are begining to see linux as a MS free market, and naturaly a easier one. And the fact that it is open sourced, is a bless, because everione has the same access to the internals, making everything more fair.
I belive hardly in Linux, and I am eagerly wainting for the I will be able to format my FAT32 partitions into ext2. But this day still far away, I have a scanner that refuses to work under linux (the people from sane forgot the poor people that have the cheaper paralell scanners). Also my printer works best in windows, witch means that when I need realy high quality prints I must reboot. But on the other hand I don't use any software that is windows only, anymore, and 99% of he time my computer is running linux.:-)
-- "take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
I think that the robots.txt could be seen as a "No trespassing" signs. For those who don't know robots.txt is a file that advertise limits for robots and spiders.
I have just one little doubt, how can one define what is a robot? If I have a cgi-bin that gets information from a site and presents this info to user on request (pehaps in a simplified way or otherwise processed way) woudn't this be a user-agent? If you say no, then maybe you should be aware that you just made proxy-servers a robot. But then you may say that a proxy dosen't change the information, so it appears as the author intended (not aways true, but...), then you just said no to lynx, since almost every site want you to see the graphical adds.
This question is rather hard to answer. I myself think that a cgi-bin could harverst information on the web. I think that if ebay is so worry about this matter, they should simply make security matter to forbidden such access, or at least make them harder.
That's my R$ 0,04 (this is more or less 2 cents of a dolar in Real the Brazil's currency)
-- "take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
I guess I have to agree in this (at least on the mouse, I never used the keyboard), I also heard that the joystick are very good too. The only problem is the prices. M$ hardware at least here in Brasil costs 10 times more then any other.:-P So I will stick to my no-name keyborad and logitech mouse.:-) -- "take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
I agree with you, many people like to have the actual CDs and a recent research (I guess that this were reported here) with the popular MP3 encoders showed that they are actualy less quality then the CD itself.
I think that if put a few bells and whistle into the CD every one will buy it, even thought they already have it on MP3.
Napster is a good thing(tm) for several reasons, like for instance geting musics before buying a cd or distribute your backyard band to the world.
Well off course pirate music is bad for every one. So is pirated software or books, but how can you stop those? Ban xerox machines? Start using some kind of unique ID in each computer?
The music is entering the hall of the "easy to copy" media, just like books and software already are. Well cheap xerox existed since I can remember needing it, and there are still very rich authors and editors. Software is easy to copy by definition, and there are M$ and other companies that sell software.
The music industry and artists will also survive, there is cash in other places. There are clips that people want to watch. There are beautyful/colorfull booklets that comes with the CDs that dosen't come with the MP3s. And off course there are live shows and concerts.
Soon the movie industry will be in the same place, an they are alredy fearing those days....
-- "take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
I agree compleatly, if they spended 2 seconds thinking on this issue they would have thought that the number of emails returned to the applications is what should be limited, something like:
An external application is trying to access e-mail addresses you have stored in Outlook. Do you want to allow this? Allow access to: 0, 5, 10, all emails
-- "take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
Well I guess that many of the steps you are asking for are being implemented into gnome. As a matter of fact many of this things are available right now.
1. Seperate UI designers from the hackers. Hackers make interfaces for hackers. Joe A. User doesn't want to use a hacker
Gnome/gtk have glade witch does exactly this, the hacker can program the holle thing and then a designer can simply change the xml that defines the UI.
2. Integrate X more for those who want it. Ask yourself this, how do you change the display settings in X? How do you change the display settings in Windows/Mac OS? Which is easier for Joe A. User to do?
Unfortunaly this is not in the scope of thje gnome project, but let's hope that Xfree 4.0 will add this.
3. Make the documentation easier to read. Avoid acronyms, hacker-ish speak, obscure references, in jokes etc. etc. Joe A. User doesn't want to slog through a load of unrelated documentation to find what he needs.
Well gnome does have a nice help system, a few (maybe more then a few) applications don't have the documentation ready. But there is an effort to document the hole thing and in several languages.
4. Standardise. Want help on a command program? Is it prog -h, prog --help, or just prog? Wanna guess? Joe A. User doesn't.
I think that this is the biggest advantage of the gnome, since it has a nice standard infrastucture for executing a lot of things, including cmd-line parsing, witch makes everithing a lot more easyer to use. The gui is also consistent, by the use of a standard toolkit.
5. Instalation & configuartion. Most programs are either source & a makefile, or an RPM/Deb. Some arn't, and use non standard installation routines. Stop it. Try to keep the config files in one standard place (/etc for example).
The instalation thingy is a lot better now thanks to distribution packaging (RPMs/deb files). It's very common to have packages for applications, and of course there is helix-code that is packaging a lot stuff into easi-ly installable packages to a lot of diferent dists. As for configuration, gnome has a standard way to store them. And there is even gconf witch promisses a lot of improvements in this front.
Well I am shure that there is more, but many of this issues are not a problem of linux only. For instance the configuration info on the windows plataform get stored in a registry file that require a special app to edit-it, and once it is corrupted all the configuration are gone (I hope you have a backup).
The windows installation scheme is flawed, since it doesn't handle requisites very well, it is common to a new program to screw the installation of an already installed program by installing a diferent version of a library. Off course linux packaging system usualy handle this well, but they do makes things harder
Well I guess that no one is perfect, well at least some of us are tring very hard to get better.:-)
-- "take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
Slashdot Mirror
Just because a security bug does not goes to a newspaper does not mean that the script kids don't get their hand in the exploit. Bugs should be common knowledge just because people should have the right to know when they are in danger.
Not publicy a security bug is like shiping explosives in a train with no marks on the box warning what they are. With the marks the people doing the transportation could take a serie of precautions to avoid the disaster, if they realy care about their lives. The same is true for software.
Shure there is 90% or more of computer users that couldn't care less about security, and that is not their fault. Microsoft make money in hiding problems under the carpet, and making hard thing looks, and I repeat LOOK, easy. Managing a computer system so it would be safe is not easy, not in UNIX and not in windows, in windows it looks like an easy task, but it isn't.
Well the bottom line is hiding problems will get people with a FALSE sense of security.
PEOPLE MUST KNOW WHEN THEY ARE IN DANGER.
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
KDE and gnome have only one standard binary, elf. What differs between the two are the libraries that they need. And for some programs you may don't even need all the libraries from gnome or KDE and in some cases you will only need the widget one (gtk for gnome and QT for KDE).
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
Only a fool would think that laws are more important then moral. Here in Brasil, we have corrupt politicians that create laws to benefit a few over the goods of the majority. Those law are not created based on the morals of the people, but they are based on private goals of a few. What is the result of this? In Brasil we have two classes of law, some that are followed by the people (those are the one that follow the morals) and those there simply don't catch and people simply don't follow them.
My guess, that this is the destiny of this law. People will copy their DVDs if they could and it realy don't matter if there is a law against it. Unless of course the goverment start using police force to enforce this law by brutality.
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
It dosen't matter if we could copy DVDs as easyly as we can watch them. There will alsways be the movies and the box offices and there will always be people that will buy their movies anyway, just because they will come with nice covers and maybe a booklet with pictures and stuff. This is what happen to books, anyone can copy a book with a xerox machine. Does people do it? Yes. Does the book publishing companies died?? NO.
Will people like n'synch dye of hunger? No. A great part of their income is from selling their images to addvertise and stuff, this will still give them enought income to pay them and their producers/distributor.
People in time-warner is not fighting for their lives here, their fighting for their extra mercedes in the garage and the company jet.
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
But then you want to start using hurd or beos or who knows some new incredible new OS that was just created. Surprize no drivers for your hardware. I guess you will have to waut untill your choice is also adopted by millions more to have a closed source driver.
I think it is an outrage to buy a piece of hardware and don't have access to the specs so you can create your own driver if you want.
My only question is what the hardware manufacturer would loose if they open the specs, I am not realy asking about drivers, I only asking for SPECS, I simply want to be able to have access to what I buy. Is that ask to much in this world???
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
This should be hard since MD5 is a criptograficly strong hash.
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
This is the second post I read saying somthig like "I live a 500km from any where, and I can live without a car". Cars are bad, they are bad for the environment, they are not very safe and the worst they create trafic. Most of the large cities have HUGE problems with trafic, because every single person wants to have your own car. This is simply not sane.
All that said, of course that people that lives outside of the cities, where you don't have a mass-trasportation system available should use their cars. Even people that live in the cities sould be able to use their cars, but they should do it in a sane way (like using car pools, that I believe that are more commons in the USA then here in Brasil where they almost don't exist).
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
No I didn't forgot that SSH is a protocol and IF it is implemented correctly it would be safe. But the people who implement the protocol is after all only humans and they make mistakes. With several diferent versions of ssh some of them could be broken in some way.
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
If you encode the same music twice (with diferent encoders) you will end up with two diferent files, and I am not counting the diferent ID tags. MD5summing would be almost useless, it would only indentify if two files are the same one, but the same music would have tons of diferent MD5sums making the fake "cucko" sound just one more.
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
And you even forgot that each diferent version could have diferent security problems, and if you count that some security problems only happen when you combine problems (like outlook + word) this could be a nightmare from the security point of view.
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
The big problem with this discussion is that you're trying to define art. Art is not something easy to define, if not impossible.
Art can have a meaning but this is very far from defining art. What does "the gioconda" means?
In my opinion, and I repeat that MY OPINION, an artist skill should be measured in how well he can touch his audience. And once a piece of art is "out there" the meaning of it is what the people who sees it whants it to be.
Is Deckard a replicant? If you don't think so then he's not. Ridley Scotts thinks he is a replicant, that only means that Deckard is a replicant for Ridley Scott. There is no real version.
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
Well in my point of view we're fighting, not to be first, the most used and etc... but to be in the market. What I want is to be able to go out and buy a scanner or a XYZW super hiper board that makes toast with your computer and be able to know how it works and how it communicates with my computer. I want to be able to see a game that I like and buy a version of it for my favorite OS (be it linux, beos, Os/2 or even "god forbids" windows). That is my utopia, and that is what I am fighting for.
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
Correct me if I am wrong but with this kind integration, it should be easy/possible to create an interface that would allow one to create simple applications (the ones that only need the default controls like textboxes, menus, checkboxes...) independently of toolkit.
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
Maybe there should be a separeted project to create this monster, maybe a GNUCOM, witch would have the joined teams of both projects (KPARTS and BONOBO). I am sujesting this so that, if some other Desktop enviroment could start using it, since it would be compleately independent from any other Desktop Enviroment (enlightment comes to mind).
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
Shure I want a very quite computer, so I can run Qunke III at the highest volume without being disturbed by the damn fans. :-)
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
With those e-noses nasa can control who the hell is smoking marihuana in the space-shuttle. :-)
:-)
I wonder if the computers would get "stoned" too.
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
Some company buys their TLD and they simply start their own root servers with what ever TLD domains that come to their head, and once one country do that some other will obviously follow. This will create a great mess, where names are regional instead of global one that we have now. :-/
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
I would love if the choice would allow me (and others) to choose to use linux instead of windows. I know that linux is not yet ready to replace the OS in the dumb user's desktops. But I do think it's ready to replace my desktop (I would only add a fault here in the printing side that must be reviewed, I am hoping that the gnome-print will bring some ligth into this area).
But the point is that I want to use linux, I fell 1000 time more confortable and more produtive with linux+gnome that in any windows machine. But many business dumbly chooses their software based in the recomendation of the MSCE guy. And then their emploees don't have the chance to choose. And in my opinion this is the gratest problem.
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
I am not here to question this benchmark, but have any one notices that this result shows how easy is to fake a result? Each of the compilers have at least one that it goes well, so let's say that I want to make a benchmark that says that gcc is the best. What I do is to do this study and then publish a lot of data or create a lot of tests that are similar to first (and maybe taking other areas in witch the gcc is good from the other graphs).
Then I publish the resulting benchmark, but don't mention the firt batery of tests or how I choosed witch test I would use.
This is also true for statistics, statistics can be used to prove/unprove almost anything. Did you know that you have 50% of chance of not dying? Yes this is true for only half of the people that ever borned had actualy died.
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
The problem is that usualy when you upgrade redhat you're also upgrading most of your software with it.
When you upgrade windows you're doing just that upgrading windows. Since Ms almost always make upgrades backward compatible, they can surely leave them untouched.
Red hat on the other hand has to deal with open source software, this means that sometime when the users/developers think that some configuration is broken they simply change the way the program is configured. When this happen red hat has 2 options leave your conf file and maybe tbreaking the program configuration or installing a new one that will work, but not as expected. Those are the files
I agree with you that wine is not the last nail in Ms coffin. In fact there are people that argue that the fact that OS/2 (do you remember?) ran win 3.1 applications so well was the final nail in Os/2's coffin, since companies thought "if os/2 users can run my software now, why would I port it?". Could wine turn into this? I don't know, linux has today more power than Os/2 ever had. Many software houses are begining to see linux as a MS free market, and naturaly a easier one. And the fact that it is open sourced, is a bless, because everione has the same access to the internals, making everything more fair.
I belive hardly in Linux, and I am eagerly wainting for the I will be able to format my FAT32 partitions into ext2. But this day still far away, I have a scanner that refuses to work under linux (the people from sane forgot the poor people that have the cheaper paralell scanners). Also my printer works best in windows, witch means that when I need realy high quality prints I must reboot. But on the other hand I don't use any software that is windows only, anymore, and 99% of he time my computer is running linux.
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
I think that the robots.txt could be seen as a "No trespassing" signs. For those who don't know robots.txt is a file that advertise limits for robots and spiders.
I have just one little doubt, how can one define what is a robot? If I have a cgi-bin that gets information from a site and presents this info to user on request (pehaps in a simplified way or otherwise processed way) woudn't this be a user-agent? If you say no, then maybe you should be aware that you just made proxy-servers a robot. But then you may say that a proxy dosen't change the information, so it appears as the author intended (not aways true, but...), then you just said no to lynx, since almost every site want you to see the graphical adds.
This question is rather hard to answer. I myself think that a cgi-bin could harverst information on the web. I think that if ebay is so worry about this matter, they should simply make security matter to forbidden such access, or at least make them harder.
That's my R$ 0,04 (this is more or less 2 cents of a dolar in Real the Brazil's currency)
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
I guess I have to agree in this (at least on the mouse, I never used the keyboard), I also heard that the joystick are very good too. The only problem is the prices. M$ hardware at least here in Brasil costs 10 times more then any other. :-P So I will stick to my no-name keyborad and logitech mouse. :-)
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"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
I agree with you, many people like to have the actual CDs and a recent research (I guess that this were reported here) with the popular MP3 encoders showed that they are actualy less quality then the CD itself.
I think that if put a few bells and whistle into the CD every one will buy it, even thought they already have it on MP3.
Napster is a good thing(tm) for several reasons, like for instance geting musics before buying a cd or distribute your backyard band to the world.
Well off course pirate music is bad for every one. So is pirated software or books, but how can you stop those? Ban xerox machines? Start using some kind of unique ID in each computer?
The music is entering the hall of the "easy to copy" media, just like books and software already are. Well cheap xerox existed since I can remember needing it, and there are still very rich authors and editors. Software is easy to copy by definition, and there are M$ and other companies that sell software.
The music industry and artists will also survive, there is cash in other places. There are clips that people want to watch. There are beautyful/colorfull booklets that comes with the CDs that dosen't come with the MP3s. And off course there are live shows and concerts.
Soon the movie industry will be in the same place, an they are alredy fearing those days....
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"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
I agree compleatly, if they spended 2 seconds thinking on this issue they would have thought that the number of emails returned to the applications is what should be limited, something like:
An external application is trying to access e-mail addresses you have stored in Outlook. Do you want to allow this?
Allow access to: 0, 5, 10, all emails
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"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
Well I guess that many of the steps you are asking for are being implemented into gnome. As a matter of fact many of this things are available right now.
:-)
1. Seperate UI designers from the hackers. Hackers make interfaces for hackers. Joe A. User doesn't want to use a hacker
Gnome/gtk have glade witch does exactly this, the hacker can program the holle thing and then a designer can simply change the xml that defines the UI.
2. Integrate X more for those who want it. Ask yourself this, how do you change the display settings in X? How do you change the display settings in Windows/Mac OS? Which is easier for Joe A. User to do?
Unfortunaly this is not in the scope of thje gnome project, but let's hope that Xfree 4.0 will add this.
3. Make the documentation easier to read. Avoid acronyms, hacker-ish speak, obscure references, in jokes etc. etc. Joe A. User doesn't want to slog through a load of unrelated documentation to find what he needs.
Well gnome does have a nice help system, a few (maybe more then a few) applications don't have the documentation ready. But there is an effort to document the hole thing and in several languages.
4. Standardise. Want help on a command program? Is it prog -h, prog --help, or just prog? Wanna guess? Joe A. User doesn't.
I think that this is the biggest advantage of the gnome, since it has a nice standard infrastucture for executing a lot of things, including cmd-line parsing, witch makes everithing a lot more easyer to use. The gui is also consistent, by the use of a standard toolkit.
5. Instalation & configuartion. Most programs are either source & a makefile, or an RPM/Deb. Some arn't, and use non standard installation routines. Stop it. Try to keep the config files in one standard place (/etc for example).
The instalation thingy is a lot better now thanks to distribution packaging (RPMs/deb files). It's very common to have packages for applications, and of course there is helix-code that is packaging a lot stuff into easi-ly installable packages to a lot of diferent dists. As for configuration, gnome has a standard way to store them. And there is even gconf witch promisses a lot of improvements in this front.
Well I am shure that there is more, but many of this issues are not a problem of linux only. For instance the configuration info on the windows plataform get stored in a registry file that require a special app to edit-it, and once it is corrupted all the configuration are gone (I hope you have a backup).
The windows installation scheme is flawed, since it doesn't handle requisites very well, it is common to a new program to screw the installation of an already installed program by installing a diferent version of a library. Off course linux packaging system usualy handle this well, but they do makes things harder
Well I guess that no one is perfect, well at least some of us are tring very hard to get better.
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"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"