Mozilla was looking really good, right up until
the very last minute. RC3 introduced a bug (bugzilla
bug number 147160) that makes Mozilla a real pain
in the ass for me to use. For now, I'm stuck with 1.0 as
my everyday browser, and 1.0rc2 running on my
second screen for status monitoring. Far from
ideal... Still, Mozilla is a monumental achievement,
and is easily my browser of choice. Opera and
Konqueror just don't cut it for me.
Anyone with half a brain turns off nearly all, if not all services to stop script kiddies like you =]
Yep, I was open jawed when I read that. All of the
web servers for which I'm responsible present an
http server to the world on ports 80 and 443,
and nothing else. As it happens, they're also
running tomcat and sshd, but that's firewalled off
(by two firewalls from different vendors), so you
won't have access to those unless you're coming in
from an approved address. Anyone who believes that
a web server would commonly have more services
running has obviously been living in the windows
world too long...
the specs for quark, MS Word (.doc), framemaker, flash, shockwave, etc. are not.
As far as I'm aware, all of those have been documented
to a greater or lesser extent. MS published the
file formats for Word 6 and Word 8 on MSDN (see
http://www.wotsit.org
for details). Equally, Macromedia published the
Flash 5 SWF file format, Adobe published the
FrameMaker MIF format (can't find it online, but
it's in the printed docs), and I believe the Quark
file format is also documented. These are far from
complete (no Word 2k, no Flash 6, no Framemaker
native format, etc.), but at least the basics are there.
While I'm sure this is an admirable project, I'd
much rather see icculus rescue me, and remove the
only reason I still have a Windows filesystem:
Serious Sam. It'd be nice to get AvP, too, but
Serious Sam is the one that counts for me. Yeah,
I know it's a volunteer effort, but I'd love to
see it deliver anyway.
The company is not, even then, making money off of RedHat's patented software; they still have to distributed the LGPLed library (and any modifications to it) freely.
The purpose of Red Hat's patents isn't to make
money, it's to protect themselves from future
patent attacks, and have a portfolio that they can
cross-license to others. If others can get at those
patents via librhpatents anyway, then RH have
nothing left with which to bargain...
Of course they can't make it binding in perpetuity, because the laws they're referring to are moving targets, and if patent laws change, or court interpretations of them change, Redhat may have to change its patent policy just to maintain the same good intention that it had before.
That's only partly true. They could (and IMHO,
should) have granted a permanent royalty free
license to use the patents to anyone releasing
code under their approved licenses. Yes, they
may need to change their patent policy in the
future, but that will only affect licensees from
that point onwards, not those who had already
licensed the patents. As it stands, a GPL package
could use the patented ideas, and in a few years
time, RH could be bought out by a company that
could then revoke the ability to use the patents.
That's not a good situation for the free software
community to find itself in...
some licenses are notably absent in the list of approved licences, like the LGPL.
This is quite deliberate. It's not possible to
approve LGPL without opening up a hole that allows
J. Random Megacorp to make an LGPL licensed
librhpatents.so, which lets them use the patents
with closed source proprietary apps.
My only complaint with Red Hat about this is that
they haven't made it binding in perpetuity.
Expect a formal clarification from the Red Hat folks about this patent and usage
I'm intrigued about this. I hope that
they'll do the right thing. I'd like to see an
immediate and permanent license to anyone writing
code under the GPL, as
done by Raph Levien, plus a firm statement
about free licensing to code under all other OSI approved
licenses on request (there can't be a blanket
statement as there can with the GPL). But in
addition, I'd like to see Red Hat actively
working towards reform of the patent system as
it stands now.
I can't agree with this enough. Serious Sam (and now, Serious Sam: The Second Encounter) is
the only reason I still have a windows partition.
It's the only game I've found since Doom that has
the same heartpounding "oh shit, there's too many
monsters" feeling. Lots and lots and *lots* of
monsters. Some levels have over 1000...
Re:Ctrl-Tab Analogue in Mozilla's Tabbed Browsing?
on
A First Look at Netscape 7
·
· Score: 4, Informative
One word (three, actually): customizable key bindings.
I don't really understand why Mozilla doesn't have it yet.
Mozilla does have customizable key bindings, and
has had for *ages*. What it doesn't have (and
really needs) is a nice GUI interface,
so that the average end user can make
those sorts of changes. For more details, see
http://www.mozilla.org/unix/customizing.html#keys
The 2 liter overhead cam motor in the Pinto is surprisingly good.
Yep. Having owned 7 Pinto powered Capris (currently
down to a measly 4:-), I can confirm that the
Pinto is a great engine, particularly in 2l form.
They're hampered by the standard Ford exhaust,
though. Stick on a 4->2->1 manifold and a large
bore exhaust, and you won't believe the improvement.
I wasn't aware that they had a bad reputation in
the US. They certainly don't here in the UK. In
race trim, you can just about hit the
magical 100bhp/litre mark, although you have to be trying
hard...
BTW, if your friend genuinely is running up to
8K RPM, the engine won't be long for this world,
unless he's modified it significantly. A standard
Pinto is good for 6500 RPM or so. Sure, it'll go
beyond that if you push it, but you're asking
for trouble. Also, peak power comes at around
5800 RPM as standard form, so there's little
benefit in pushing beyond that.
there is nothing like Veritas's VXVA on Linux, or for logical paritioning.
Ahem. I assume you mean VxVM (which is what does
the partitioning). And since you ask, there are
three things that do that on Linux:
LVM,
EVMS,
and yes, genuine
Veritas VxVM (and also VxFS
thrown in, to boot). Solaris may be better at
some things than Linux, but the number of things
that fall in that category is shrinking rapidly.
Volume management no longer qualifies.
Most computer users don't need 3D, most computer users don't need 3 fuckin' monitors eighther. Of the people who are using three monitors to do their work, I am betting a good lot of them are doing something with 3D some of the time.
Speaking from personal experience, I can assure you
that you're completely wrong. I've seen countless multi-headed
setups in a number of companies I've worked
for (and indeed, I have a dual headed setup myself
in my current job). Not one of those
was ever used for 3D. They're used exclusively
for 2D, for displaying more information than
fits on one screen. Mine shows the status of
all the production machines for which I'm
responsible, for example, while still leaving
enough real estate for me to get my work done.
In the banking world, they're used to display
market prices, etc.
Oh it's come down a few times, but we've never lost any data.
Yeah, but that's the point I was trying to make.
No matter how reliable it is, or even how many times
its gone down without data loss, you're still
trusting to luck. An ACID database guarantees
you won't lose data. I'd quite happily use MySQL
for any number of trivial things. But once the data
has sufficient value, it's just not worth
the risk.
MySQL is fairly reliable; the process on our mail server has been up for hundreds of days
This is exactly the sort of anecdotal evidence
that open source advocates need to avoid. The
fact that it's reliable to that extent is completely
irrelevant. Businesses (and in this case,
governments) don't care if it goes down occasionally.
Sure, they'd rather it didn't. But what they do care
about is that if it does go down, they don't lose
data integrity. It's far less costly to have 2
hours downtime than it is to have garbage data
in your database (potentially without you knowing
about it). MySQL doesn't have the ACID properties,
that provide this level of assurance,
and until it does, it won't really be suitable
for this sort of use.
I agree that in some ways Gibson is over-rated, but I meant that his perspective is much different from that of the previous generation.
Yep, I wholeheartedly agree with that. A lot of it,
I suspect, stems from the fact that he has no
scientific background, in direct contrast to the
big names of the past. Some claim that gives him a
freedom to write about things that others don't
have. My personal view is that people use it as
an excuse for his vague and sloppy handling of
technology. I certainly don't think it improves
his writing, and I think others with the same
persepctive handle things much better. Just to
pick an obscure one out of the blue, Katharine
Kerr's "Polar City Blues" is a frequently
underrated example. Perhaps not as hardcore as
Gibson, but a far better book.
Neuromancer or almost anything else by Gibson. Many titles by Gregory Benford.
Cough. Now I know I'm probably in the minority
here, but Gibson has to be the most overrated,
talentless wannabe to enter the SF scene for
years. Neuromancer was an art book, not SF, and
not a particularly well written one at that. His
other efforts have been equally uninspiring.
As for Benford, I lost all respect
for him after his awful handling of "Beyond the
fall of night". Clarke's original was a masterpiece,
but Benford's sequel just highlighted the difference
in class between the two. He has some good ideas
at times, but can't seem to turn them into a
good, readable story. On the other hand, his
non-fiction science writing is actually very
good.
This isn't intended to be flamebait. I'm
just stunned that you've managed to single out
two authors for praise that I'd have placed near
the bottom of the pile. I guess there's no
accounting for taste:-)
Instead, requirements would read: MSWKernel 1.2343 or better, MSGDI 1.232 or better, REALSound 1.001 or better, AOLNetworking 0.12415 or better.
Worng, wrong, wrong! Requirements would be MS-SoundAPI 1.2 or better, MS-NetworkAPI 1.1 or better, etc. Requirements are API based, not implementation based.
Third party software would work with any implementation of media player / networking stack /
web browser / whatever, so long as it uses the
standard API provided by MS. I personally think
that would be a great direction for MS to head.
In fact, Linux could do with taking a look at
that, too. Sure, we're further down the road than
MS, but it's too easy to get complacent. Debian's
(and now Red Hat's) alternatives system handles
this reasonably well, but there's certainly room
for improvement.
My wrist hurts from deleting over a meg of mail worm viruses a day.
Procmail is your friend.
As soon as I get more than 4 or 5 copies of a spam /
worm / virus, it gets a procmail rule to autodelete
it. Simple, really...
RedHat is just being spiteful and not properly deprecating GCC 2.96X.
No, Red Hat are just following their published
policy of maintaining binary compatibility between
releases with the same version number. Sure, they
*could* have upped the version to 8.0, but then
they'd have had to bump it up to 9.0 once gcc 3.x
reaches sufficient stability, and that would have
alienated a whole bunch of people a lot more than
their current strategy. Whatever you may believe,
gcc 3.x isn't yet ready for prime time.
Remember that a company like Red Hat have to
devote significant resources to support, and they
will (as they should) follow whatever strategy
leads to the most stable system, and hence the
one that sucks least resoruces from the company.
Red Hat aren't perfect, and
have screwed up in various ways in the past.
However, on this issue, I'm 100% behind them...
Keep in mind, all these well-developed 'Linux' applications are actually well-developed 'Unix' applications and run under every Unix-like Operating System.
Actually, that's not true any more. As with anything,
the arrival of the masses lowers the quality.
As Linux has got more popular, the number of
poorly written Linux-specific applications has
increased dramatically, and the portability of
a lot of software has significantly decreased.
Yes, a lot of it does still work, but there's
plenty that doesn't. Interesting to note that
all three applications you cited are portable
at least in part thanks to the design and
portability of
gtk and gdk.
Training is usually paid for by the company
because it's in their interest for you to have
the skills in question. However, in situations
like this, they're claiming that the training
costs are a benefit to you, and hence
you should give them something back in return
(i.e., continued service). With this in mind,
you are then well within your rights to refuse
the training. If the company wants you to go on
a course to learn about XYZ, then refuse unless
you believe that XYZ is of sufficient value to
you to make it worthwhile. If it is, so much the
better -- go on the course, and increase your
knowledge. If it's not, then refuse the course unless they remove the restrictions.
Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla was looking really good, right up until the very last minute. RC3 introduced a bug (bugzilla bug number 147160) that makes Mozilla a real pain in the ass for me to use. For now, I'm stuck with 1.0 as my everyday browser, and 1.0rc2 running on my second screen for status monitoring. Far from ideal... Still, Mozilla is a monumental achievement, and is easily my browser of choice. Opera and Konqueror just don't cut it for me.
Yep, I was open jawed when I read that. All of the web servers for which I'm responsible present an http server to the world on ports 80 and 443, and nothing else. As it happens, they're also running tomcat and sshd, but that's firewalled off (by two firewalls from different vendors), so you won't have access to those unless you're coming in from an approved address. Anyone who believes that a web server would commonly have more services running has obviously been living in the windows world too long...
As far as I'm aware, all of those have been documented to a greater or lesser extent. MS published the file formats for Word 6 and Word 8 on MSDN (see http://www.wotsit.org for details). Equally, Macromedia published the Flash 5 SWF file format, Adobe published the FrameMaker MIF format (can't find it online, but it's in the printed docs), and I believe the Quark file format is also documented. These are far from complete (no Word 2k, no Flash 6, no Framemaker native format, etc.), but at least the basics are there.
While I'm sure this is an admirable project, I'd much rather see icculus rescue me, and remove the only reason I still have a Windows filesystem: Serious Sam. It'd be nice to get AvP, too, but Serious Sam is the one that counts for me. Yeah, I know it's a volunteer effort, but I'd love to see it deliver anyway.
The purpose of Red Hat's patents isn't to make money, it's to protect themselves from future patent attacks, and have a portfolio that they can cross-license to others. If others can get at those patents via librhpatents anyway, then RH have nothing left with which to bargain...
That's only partly true. They could (and IMHO, should) have granted a permanent royalty free license to use the patents to anyone releasing code under their approved licenses. Yes, they may need to change their patent policy in the future, but that will only affect licensees from that point onwards, not those who had already licensed the patents. As it stands, a GPL package could use the patented ideas, and in a few years time, RH could be bought out by a company that could then revoke the ability to use the patents. That's not a good situation for the free software community to find itself in...
This is quite deliberate. It's not possible to approve LGPL without opening up a hole that allows J. Random Megacorp to make an LGPL licensed librhpatents.so, which lets them use the patents with closed source proprietary apps. My only complaint with Red Hat about this is that they haven't made it binding in perpetuity.
You mean like this one?
Not in my browser they can't. Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Scripts & Windows -> Allow webpages to change status bar text.
I'm intrigued about this. I hope that they'll do the right thing. I'd like to see an immediate and permanent license to anyone writing code under the GPL, as done by Raph Levien, plus a firm statement about free licensing to code under all other OSI approved licenses on request (there can't be a blanket statement as there can with the GPL). But in addition, I'd like to see Red Hat actively working towards reform of the patent system as it stands now.
I can't agree with this enough. Serious Sam (and now, Serious Sam: The Second Encounter) is the only reason I still have a windows partition. It's the only game I've found since Doom that has the same heartpounding "oh shit, there's too many monsters" feeling. Lots and lots and *lots* of monsters. Some levels have over 1000...
Mozilla does have customizable key bindings, and has had for *ages*. What it doesn't have (and really needs) is a nice GUI interface, so that the average end user can make those sorts of changes. For more details, see http://www.mozilla.org/unix/customizing.html#keys
Yep. Having owned 7 Pinto powered Capris (currently down to a measly 4 :-), I can confirm that the
Pinto is a great engine, particularly in 2l form.
They're hampered by the standard Ford exhaust,
though. Stick on a 4->2->1 manifold and a large
bore exhaust, and you won't believe the improvement.
I wasn't aware that they had a bad reputation in
the US. They certainly don't here in the UK. In
race trim, you can just about hit the
magical 100bhp/litre mark, although you have to be trying
hard...
BTW, if your friend genuinely is running up to 8K RPM, the engine won't be long for this world, unless he's modified it significantly. A standard Pinto is good for 6500 RPM or so. Sure, it'll go beyond that if you push it, but you're asking for trouble. Also, peak power comes at around 5800 RPM as standard form, so there's little benefit in pushing beyond that.
If you live in the UK, head on down to your local Game store. Mine's still selling Lynx and Jaguar games (and indeed, Jaguar consoles!).
Ahem. I assume you mean VxVM (which is what does the partitioning). And since you ask, there are three things that do that on Linux: LVM, EVMS, and yes, genuine Veritas VxVM (and also VxFS thrown in, to boot). Solaris may be better at some things than Linux, but the number of things that fall in that category is shrinking rapidly. Volume management no longer qualifies.
Speaking from personal experience, I can assure you that you're completely wrong. I've seen countless multi-headed setups in a number of companies I've worked for (and indeed, I have a dual headed setup myself in my current job). Not one of those was ever used for 3D. They're used exclusively for 2D, for displaying more information than fits on one screen. Mine shows the status of all the production machines for which I'm responsible, for example, while still leaving enough real estate for me to get my work done. In the banking world, they're used to display market prices, etc.
Yeah, but that's the point I was trying to make. No matter how reliable it is, or even how many times its gone down without data loss, you're still trusting to luck. An ACID database guarantees you won't lose data. I'd quite happily use MySQL for any number of trivial things. But once the data has sufficient value, it's just not worth the risk.
This is exactly the sort of anecdotal evidence that open source advocates need to avoid. The fact that it's reliable to that extent is completely irrelevant. Businesses (and in this case, governments) don't care if it goes down occasionally. Sure, they'd rather it didn't. But what they do care about is that if it does go down, they don't lose data integrity. It's far less costly to have 2 hours downtime than it is to have garbage data in your database (potentially without you knowing about it). MySQL doesn't have the ACID properties, that provide this level of assurance, and until it does, it won't really be suitable for this sort of use.
Yep, I wholeheartedly agree with that. A lot of it, I suspect, stems from the fact that he has no scientific background, in direct contrast to the big names of the past. Some claim that gives him a freedom to write about things that others don't have. My personal view is that people use it as an excuse for his vague and sloppy handling of technology. I certainly don't think it improves his writing, and I think others with the same persepctive handle things much better. Just to pick an obscure one out of the blue, Katharine Kerr's "Polar City Blues" is a frequently underrated example. Perhaps not as hardcore as Gibson, but a far better book.
Cough. Now I know I'm probably in the minority here, but Gibson has to be the most overrated, talentless wannabe to enter the SF scene for years. Neuromancer was an art book, not SF, and not a particularly well written one at that. His other efforts have been equally uninspiring.
As for Benford, I lost all respect for him after his awful handling of "Beyond the fall of night". Clarke's original was a masterpiece, but Benford's sequel just highlighted the difference in class between the two. He has some good ideas at times, but can't seem to turn them into a good, readable story. On the other hand, his non-fiction science writing is actually very good.
This isn't intended to be flamebait. I'm just stunned that you've managed to single out two authors for praise that I'd have placed near the bottom of the pile. I guess there's no accounting for taste :-)
Worng, wrong, wrong! Requirements would be MS-SoundAPI 1.2 or better, MS-NetworkAPI 1.1 or better, etc. Requirements are API based, not implementation based. Third party software would work with any implementation of media player / networking stack / web browser / whatever, so long as it uses the standard API provided by MS. I personally think that would be a great direction for MS to head. In fact, Linux could do with taking a look at that, too. Sure, we're further down the road than MS, but it's too easy to get complacent. Debian's (and now Red Hat's) alternatives system handles this reasonably well, but there's certainly room for improvement.
Procmail is your friend. As soon as I get more than 4 or 5 copies of a spam / worm / virus, it gets a procmail rule to autodelete it. Simple, really...
No, Red Hat are just following their published policy of maintaining binary compatibility between releases with the same version number. Sure, they *could* have upped the version to 8.0, but then they'd have had to bump it up to 9.0 once gcc 3.x reaches sufficient stability, and that would have alienated a whole bunch of people a lot more than their current strategy. Whatever you may believe, gcc 3.x isn't yet ready for prime time. Remember that a company like Red Hat have to devote significant resources to support, and they will (as they should) follow whatever strategy leads to the most stable system, and hence the one that sucks least resoruces from the company. Red Hat aren't perfect, and have screwed up in various ways in the past. However, on this issue, I'm 100% behind them...
Actually, that's not true any more. As with anything, the arrival of the masses lowers the quality. As Linux has got more popular, the number of poorly written Linux-specific applications has increased dramatically, and the portability of a lot of software has significantly decreased. Yes, a lot of it does still work, but there's plenty that doesn't. Interesting to note that all three applications you cited are portable at least in part thanks to the design and portability of gtk and gdk.
Training is usually paid for by the company because it's in their interest for you to have the skills in question. However, in situations like this, they're claiming that the training costs are a benefit to you, and hence you should give them something back in return (i.e., continued service). With this in mind, you are then well within your rights to refuse the training. If the company wants you to go on a course to learn about XYZ, then refuse unless you believe that XYZ is of sufficient value to you to make it worthwhile. If it is, so much the better -- go on the course, and increase your knowledge. If it's not, then refuse the course unless they remove the restrictions.