I wish he'd put a XML parser into glic so that no-one has an excuse for not using XML for configuration files and for data export / import.
Were there one available, I would still be unlikely
to use it. The fact remains that after you've seen
through all the marketing hype, XML remains
inappropriate for many tasks, and configuration
files are right at the top of the list. You only
have to look at Jabber or Tomcat to see some
perfect examples of that.
How he is considered qualified to talk about the LSB when it doesn't have much of anything to do with Glibc
The LSB has nothing to do with glibc? Really? Strange.
I always thought the LSB was designed to ensure
binary compatibility between distributions, and
hence has quite a lot to do with glibc.
Personally, I still think the LSB has some value,
but Uli's concerns are valid. IMHO, they seem to point
to problems with the current LSB test suite that
should be fixed, rather than leading to the
conclusion that the whole concept is broken,
though.
In its current form, there is little value to
be had in LSB compliance, true. But it needn't
always be that way. A decision needs to be made
to either fix the LSB or abandon it altogether.
Uli prefers the latter approach. I favour the
former.
I thought Firefox/Thunderbird/Sunbird[/Nvu] were basically better versions of what existed in the original Mozilla platform?
The simple answer is that they're not
better versions. I was eager to switch to Firefox
(or Phoenix and later Firebird as it was then), as I don't
use anything from the suite other than the browser
anyway. But when it surfaced, it turned out to be
a poor substitute for the real thing. Mozilla was
and continues to be a better browser. That's why
I use it.
I'm sure that with the addition of various
extensions, I could probably get Firefox up to
the same level as Mozilla. But Mozilla does it
all out of the box, and I don't have to go around
hunting for addons, or spend ages customising it
in about:config.
Here's a problem: It is a 9250.
Being an RMS emulator has its time and place, but lets be realistic shall we?
Sure, let's be realistic. I have a 9200 because at
the time I bought it (last year, IIRC),
it was the fastest card
available with free drivers. Yes, that's important
enough to me to be worth putting my money where my
mouth is. You know what? The 9200 turns out to be
a pretty decent card. OK, so it may not be a match
for
the latest whizz-bang-turbo-plus-FX-hyper-overdrive card,
but in terms of putting pixels on the screen,
I've got no complaints. It keeps up with everything
I want to do, both 2D and 3D. Unless you're
wanting to do heavy duty CAD (which I'm not),
or unless you're wanting to play games with
Cedega (which not being free, I'm not), then it's
a great graphics card for Linux systems, and I
can highly recommend it.
I'm living proof that it's possible to be ethical
about your purchases, and still have a usable
system. So what's not realistic?
With the pager in E, you can actually *place* the window within the pager...
Oooh, just like you've been able to do in fvwm for
10+ years now. Oh, and if you look at his benchmark
results, fvwm is faster than E17 out of the box,
too.
Incidentally, I'm not knocking Raster here. He's
done some wonderful stuff, and for the most part,
been quite badly treated by some of the big
players. But fvwm rocks.
But looking at the Sun entry, the old record was set using 2 year old software, and a much smaller disk configuration.
Indeed. It doesn't strike me as being a particularly
impressive record when there are only a total of 18
entries submitted, and most of them are 3 or more
years old. I'm sure that I could quite easily come
up with a system capable of beating the previous
record for a reasonable cost simply by using modern
hardware and minimal configuration tweaking.
There is no tasteful nudity in my opinion. It's offensive to all parties involved
It's not offensive to me, so if I'm one of the parties
involved, your argument falls flat. But assuming it's
true, what next? Legislate against it? No nudity
or you get fined/go to jail/whatever. Who decides
what else is banned? I find
Christian crosses actively offensive. Does that
mean I get to legislate against them? Keep them
off my TV screens, and out of my newsprint and
magazines. Where does it stop?
The same argument could be applied to
pretty much anything. Someone somewhere will deem
it offensive. Far better, IMHO, to have a community
that simply
tolerates things that certain individuals
may find distasteful.
The reality is that often it isn't, people (not just IT workers) fail to see just how good their job is and resign themselves to being miserable about it.
I'm not convinced about this. I've worked in many
companies where IT staff are treated visibly worse
than those in other roles. The only exception is
remuneration -- we're paid better than those in
other areas. But this in itself leads to problems.
Many companies see IT as a huge drain on their
pockets, and resent us for it. The biggest
problem, though, is that many companies fail to
see IT as core to their business. They think of
themselves as a bank or a publisher or an
insurance broker
first, and as an IT shop second. True, IT isn't
the reason for their existence, but they can't
grasp how much their business would fall apart
without it.
It really looks like the team in charge of IE 7 actually cares about standards compliance [...] I want to be clear that our intent is to build a platform that fully complies with the appropriate web standards
This really is a major step in the right direction. I don't think most people realise
just how significant that statement is.
It's the first time (that I'm aware of) that anyone
from MS has publicly stated standards compliance as
a goal for IE. It's nearly a decade late, but it's
very welcome nonetheless.
I was lamenting only yesterday about the nightmare that IE is to
work with. The sooner they fix it up, the better.
A week is fine to isolate the problem, and code a
suitable fix. But having worked for large companies,
I can tell you first hand that no amount of
willpower will get a fix like that through testing
in a week. You could probably rush it through in a
fortnight, so 4 weeks is a reasonable timeframe.
If they can't get a fix out in less
than 4 weeks, they deserve to lose customers, so
I'd have no qualms about going for full disclosure
at that point.
couldn't he at least have waited a few weeks to see how Cisco responds
Yes, he could. But then again, I suspect he already
did. The traditional approach was to tell the vendor,
and announce the flaw publicly 28 days later. That
gave a vendor sufficient time to code and test a
patch. However, many vendors (and Cisco seem to be
particularly bad about this) sit on problems like
this
for several months and take no immediate action.
I'd be far from surprised to
hear Cisco were notified of this 3 months ago,
hence Lynn's frustration and his decision to
publicly talk about the flaw. I don't actually
know what happened, and the above is just speculation. I suspect there's more than a grain
of truth to it, though.
The fact that it's really for SVG will hold you back, too - many commercial printers are tied to Illustrator
Not a problem. I've been doing all of my vector
work in Inkscape for a while now. I export it to
EPSF, which I hand to my printer, who opens it in
Illustrator and takes it from there.
I've had one for years and barely have touched it.
Me too. But that all changed when I got an SL-C860.
The clamshell form factor (and that stunning screen) makes all the difference.
While the SL-5500 was an interesting hackable toy, the SL-C860 is a joy to use and a really useful
bit of kit, particularly for doing remote support
(a bluetooth CF card and a mobile phone make it an
indispensable item for me).
If you use Snort-Inline along with IPTables and some scripts in Linux, you can come up with a pretty decent IPS.
s/IPS/DoS/
Any IDS that automatically affects firewall rules
is an incredibly dumb idea. Just don't do it. You're
putting control of your firewall rules in the hands
of an attacker, which makes a DoS attack trivial.
I spent a long time convincing
management that we didn't want such a system,
despite all the vendors' marketing claims that
it was an essential part of modern network
security.
It eventually took a demo where I spoofed an
attack from our upstream provider
and the system automatically dropped us
off the net before they listened[1]. It may seem
like a good idea, and indeed with a bit of
intelligence in your rules, it can help in some
situations. But it's a dangerous game to be
playing, and I wouldn't recommend it for any
business.
[1] No, not on the production network (although
I was tempted).
Is anyone really browsing the web from their cell phone? PDA?
Yes. Only a couple of days ago, I was in the pub
with a few friends, and wanted to show them
something. So we looked at it via the web browser
built into a number of our phones. And because I'd
made the site standards compliant, it all worked
perfectly. That wasn't an isolated incident, either.
A mobile phone may not be my preferred
browsing platform, but it's still useful at times,
and there's no reason to design a site that doesn't
work with them (these days, it's pretty much a
case of having to explicitly go out of your way
to make the site not work on mobile devices --
unless you're using Flash, NightmareWeaver etc.)
Nope, they have their own layout, too. But for pragmatic reasons, they also support QWERTY
layouts, and you can switch between QWERTY
and Maltron layouts at the touch of a button.
I'm interested in switching over to an alternate keyboard layout,
probably Dvorak, before I begin to suffer any effects of RSI.
If you're serious, then rather than Dvorak, choose one of the layouts
specifically designed to help RSI. The leading contender is probably
the Maltron layout. The sculpted
keyboard helps, too, but they're also available in more traditional
flat models as well.
I start to wonder just how long Step 4 will remain viable for MS. Especially after the US$850 million settlement with IBM
A long time.
At current levels, MS would need to settle a case
like that once every 28 days before they start
dipping into unprofitability. A $1,000,000,000 hit
occasionally certainly hurts, but it's far from
critical damage and is sustainable for some time
yet.
This is an improvement over the only noticable feature of "has nipples" from previous Batman films
The suit was made by a friend of mine, who happens
to be a big fan, so he put the effort in to make the suit look right. Of all the batman films so far,
it's probably the one that most
closely mirrors the comics.
OpenBSD provides just as good a minimalist, clean and reliable system
Much as I love OpenBSD, that's not strictly true.
The NetBSD init system, for example, is a thing of
beauty, and it's both cleaner and more functional than the traditional equivalent found in OpenBSD.
There's a lot of innovation happening in NetBSD,
and it's worth keeping an eye on.
Of course if you consider 1280x1024 at 18" dia. to be low resolution then you need your eyes checked anyway.
Ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha. Ouch. Stop me before my
aching sides split. Yes, I consider that to be
very low resolution. How anyone can cope with that
little screen real estate is beyond me. Yes, I know
that most people do. But I'm not most people. I'm
currently running at 2048x1536. Affordable LCDs
can't touch that (yet).
Indeed. I'm all for multiheaded setups. But until
the quality of LCDs improves substantially, I'll be
sticking with CRT. Yeah, so it requires more desk
real estate. But I care more about my eyes[1] than I
do about saving space. I'ts much cheaper,
too.
[1] Many people claim that LCDs are better for your
eyes than CRTs. All I can say is that my experience
is the opposite. LCDs cause my eyes to strain,
and give me a headache with
prolonged use. And they're too low resolution
for me anyway (although that is changing, and
it won't be long before mainstream
LCDs get to a decent resolution).
Pricing is NOT determined by how much something costs. Pricing is determined by what price will generate the most profit for the person providing the product.
Were ICANN a normal corporation, I'd be the first
to agree with you. Fortunately, it's not. It's a
non-profit organization that puts the well being
of the Internet ahead of making money for its
shareholders. Or at least, it should.
Varying pricing depending on TLD is not a step
in the right direction. You want to encourage
porn sites to move to.xxx, not price it so that
they stay away.
Slashdot Mirror
Were there one available, I would still be unlikely to use it. The fact remains that after you've seen through all the marketing hype, XML remains inappropriate for many tasks, and configuration files are right at the top of the list. You only have to look at Jabber or Tomcat to see some perfect examples of that.
The LSB has nothing to do with glibc? Really? Strange. I always thought the LSB was designed to ensure binary compatibility between distributions, and hence has quite a lot to do with glibc.
Personally, I still think the LSB has some value, but Uli's concerns are valid. IMHO, they seem to point to problems with the current LSB test suite that should be fixed, rather than leading to the conclusion that the whole concept is broken, though. In its current form, there is little value to be had in LSB compliance, true. But it needn't always be that way. A decision needs to be made to either fix the LSB or abandon it altogether. Uli prefers the latter approach. I favour the former.
The simple answer is that they're not better versions. I was eager to switch to Firefox (or Phoenix and later Firebird as it was then), as I don't use anything from the suite other than the browser anyway. But when it surfaced, it turned out to be a poor substitute for the real thing. Mozilla was and continues to be a better browser. That's why I use it.
I'm sure that with the addition of various extensions, I could probably get Firefox up to the same level as Mozilla. But Mozilla does it all out of the box, and I don't have to go around hunting for addons, or spend ages customising it in about:config.
Yes, OpenGL is accelerated. Zero setup. It just all works out of the box (with recent Fedora Core distributions, at least).
Sure, let's be realistic. I have a 9200 because at the time I bought it (last year, IIRC), it was the fastest card available with free drivers. Yes, that's important enough to me to be worth putting my money where my mouth is. You know what? The 9200 turns out to be a pretty decent card. OK, so it may not be a match for the latest whizz-bang-turbo-plus-FX-hyper-overdrive card, but in terms of putting pixels on the screen, I've got no complaints. It keeps up with everything I want to do, both 2D and 3D. Unless you're wanting to do heavy duty CAD (which I'm not), or unless you're wanting to play games with Cedega (which not being free, I'm not), then it's a great graphics card for Linux systems, and I can highly recommend it.
I'm living proof that it's possible to be ethical about your purchases, and still have a usable system. So what's not realistic?
Oooh, just like you've been able to do in fvwm for 10+ years now. Oh, and if you look at his benchmark results, fvwm is faster than E17 out of the box, too.
Incidentally, I'm not knocking Raster here. He's done some wonderful stuff, and for the most part, been quite badly treated by some of the big players. But fvwm rocks.
Indeed. It doesn't strike me as being a particularly impressive record when there are only a total of 18 entries submitted, and most of them are 3 or more years old. I'm sure that I could quite easily come up with a system capable of beating the previous record for a reasonable cost simply by using modern hardware and minimal configuration tweaking.
It's not offensive to me, so if I'm one of the parties involved, your argument falls flat. But assuming it's true, what next? Legislate against it? No nudity or you get fined/go to jail/whatever. Who decides what else is banned? I find Christian crosses actively offensive. Does that mean I get to legislate against them? Keep them off my TV screens, and out of my newsprint and magazines. Where does it stop? The same argument could be applied to pretty much anything. Someone somewhere will deem it offensive. Far better, IMHO, to have a community that simply tolerates things that certain individuals may find distasteful.
I'm not convinced about this. I've worked in many companies where IT staff are treated visibly worse than those in other roles. The only exception is remuneration -- we're paid better than those in other areas. But this in itself leads to problems. Many companies see IT as a huge drain on their pockets, and resent us for it. The biggest problem, though, is that many companies fail to see IT as core to their business. They think of themselves as a bank or a publisher or an insurance broker first, and as an IT shop second. True, IT isn't the reason for their existence, but they can't grasp how much their business would fall apart without it.
This really is a major step in the right direction. I don't think most people realise just how significant that statement is. It's the first time (that I'm aware of) that anyone from MS has publicly stated standards compliance as a goal for IE. It's nearly a decade late, but it's very welcome nonetheless.
I was lamenting only yesterday about the nightmare that IE is to work with. The sooner they fix it up, the better.
A week is fine to isolate the problem, and code a suitable fix. But having worked for large companies, I can tell you first hand that no amount of willpower will get a fix like that through testing in a week. You could probably rush it through in a fortnight, so 4 weeks is a reasonable timeframe. If they can't get a fix out in less than 4 weeks, they deserve to lose customers, so I'd have no qualms about going for full disclosure at that point.
Yes, he could. But then again, I suspect he already did. The traditional approach was to tell the vendor, and announce the flaw publicly 28 days later. That gave a vendor sufficient time to code and test a patch. However, many vendors (and Cisco seem to be particularly bad about this) sit on problems like this for several months and take no immediate action. I'd be far from surprised to hear Cisco were notified of this 3 months ago, hence Lynn's frustration and his decision to publicly talk about the flaw. I don't actually know what happened, and the above is just speculation. I suspect there's more than a grain of truth to it, though.
Not a problem. I've been doing all of my vector work in Inkscape for a while now. I export it to EPSF, which I hand to my printer, who opens it in Illustrator and takes it from there.
Me too. But that all changed when I got an SL-C860. The clamshell form factor (and that stunning screen) makes all the difference. While the SL-5500 was an interesting hackable toy, the SL-C860 is a joy to use and a really useful bit of kit, particularly for doing remote support (a bluetooth CF card and a mobile phone make it an indispensable item for me).
s/IPS/DoS/
Any IDS that automatically affects firewall rules is an incredibly dumb idea. Just don't do it. You're putting control of your firewall rules in the hands of an attacker, which makes a DoS attack trivial. I spent a long time convincing management that we didn't want such a system, despite all the vendors' marketing claims that it was an essential part of modern network security. It eventually took a demo where I spoofed an attack from our upstream provider and the system automatically dropped us off the net before they listened[1]. It may seem like a good idea, and indeed with a bit of intelligence in your rules, it can help in some situations. But it's a dangerous game to be playing, and I wouldn't recommend it for any business.
[1] No, not on the production network (although I was tempted).
Yes. Only a couple of days ago, I was in the pub with a few friends, and wanted to show them something. So we looked at it via the web browser built into a number of our phones. And because I'd made the site standards compliant, it all worked perfectly. That wasn't an isolated incident, either. A mobile phone may not be my preferred browsing platform, but it's still useful at times, and there's no reason to design a site that doesn't work with them (these days, it's pretty much a case of having to explicitly go out of your way to make the site not work on mobile devices -- unless you're using Flash, NightmareWeaver etc.)
Nope, they have their own layout, too. But for pragmatic reasons, they also support QWERTY layouts, and you can switch between QWERTY and Maltron layouts at the touch of a button.
If you're serious, then rather than Dvorak, choose one of the layouts specifically designed to help RSI. The leading contender is probably the Maltron layout. The sculpted keyboard helps, too, but they're also available in more traditional flat models as well.
A long time. At current levels, MS would need to settle a case like that once every 28 days before they start dipping into unprofitability. A $1,000,000,000 hit occasionally certainly hurts, but it's far from critical damage and is sustainable for some time yet.
The suit was made by a friend of mine, who happens to be a big fan, so he put the effort in to make the suit look right. Of all the batman films so far, it's probably the one that most closely mirrors the comics.
Much as I love OpenBSD, that's not strictly true. The NetBSD init system, for example, is a thing of beauty, and it's both cleaner and more functional than the traditional equivalent found in OpenBSD. There's a lot of innovation happening in NetBSD, and it's worth keeping an eye on.
Or in SI units, 2 picoseconds.
Ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha. Ouch. Stop me before my aching sides split. Yes, I consider that to be very low resolution. How anyone can cope with that little screen real estate is beyond me. Yes, I know that most people do. But I'm not most people. I'm currently running at 2048x1536. Affordable LCDs can't touch that (yet).
Indeed. I'm all for multiheaded setups. But until the quality of LCDs improves substantially, I'll be sticking with CRT. Yeah, so it requires more desk real estate. But I care more about my eyes[1] than I do about saving space. I'ts much cheaper, too.
[1] Many people claim that LCDs are better for your eyes than CRTs. All I can say is that my experience is the opposite. LCDs cause my eyes to strain, and give me a headache with prolonged use. And they're too low resolution for me anyway (although that is changing, and it won't be long before mainstream LCDs get to a decent resolution).
Were ICANN a normal corporation, I'd be the first to agree with you. Fortunately, it's not. It's a non-profit organization that puts the well being of the Internet ahead of making money for its shareholders. Or at least, it should. Varying pricing depending on TLD is not a step in the right direction. You want to encourage porn sites to move to .xxx, not price it so that
they stay away.