I just find that doubtful, because FreeDOS is not installed. Is it going to come with instructions on how to install FreeDOS, and how to install Linux (or Windows) in such a way that FreeDOS is not wiped? Are the instructions going to point out that if you don't follow them you will lose customer support? If the instructions don't point this out I think they may be in for a lawsuit. If the instructions do point it out, then they are going to get *more* calls from people asking how to install FreeDOS and install Linux over it (I certainly would call). Therefore the only logical conclusion is that they are either prepared to support the nearly 100% of these machines that won't have FreeDos correctly installed, or they are not going to support these machines whatsoever. In neither case does FreeDOS save them money, so it does not explain it.
Your explanation makes sense if FreeDOS runs off it's CD without touching the hard disk. But then it would not need to be "installed". It is possible that their announcement is badly worded, they should clearly state the benifits of including the FreeDOS disk and not mention that it is "not installed".
FlexLM is very easy to break compared to the typical copy protection you will get on a game. It's purpose is to keep reasonably honest people in line and allow them to control shared licenses from a central server in such a way that the number can be easily increased or decreased.
I believe Maya relies on the fact that the license is easy to break. This gets a lot of home users to learn how to use Maya before they get a job in computer graphics, which greatly increases their market share.
Incidentally, the cracking program for Windows will produce a license that works for the Linux version on a machine with the same MAC address.
Unbelievable that 3 different Microsoft apologists have said that "FreeDOS" is necessary for testing the machine. That would make sense if it was *installed*. It's not, the disk is blank. RTFA.
And another person said the reason FreeDOS was included instead of NOTHING is because they don't want to support Linux. CLUE: installing NOTHING means you don't have to support Linux *or* FreeDOS.
In fact something is screwy. And the Microsoft apologists are really scrambling to explain away the real reasons, which the original poster certainly nailed.
Linux started from scratch, which left lots of interesting development to do that was already complete on BSD. That brought a lot of talented developers to the table that would have been bored working with BSDs existing framework.
Now you are just being silly. Tell you what, I am going to start, right now, a new OS that is sure to be more popular than Linux, by your logic. It is fully BSD licensed. And it will get most of the talented developers, because *all* the interesting work needs to be done! Not like that boring old Linux where interesting stuff has already been done.
Playing music is not a copyright violation. Smashing the disk into pieces is not a copyright violation. Copying it to backup is not a copyright violation. Editing it into a new piece of music that you listen to yourself is not a copyright violation.
Giving a copy to your friends, or uploading it so others can get it, is a copyright violation.
Get it? It really is blatently obvious what the difference is.
I understand the proposal and it is not as dangerous as the FUD-masters say (in particular the proposal is meaningless unless the original author inserts a "download the source" feature).
But there seems to be a huge problem. Currently the GPL is just an exception to copyright law, allowing the receivier to do something with the code that they would not normally be able to do because of copyright. It does not prevent the user from doing anything that is not restricted by copyright or other laws. This makes the GPL completely legally bulletproof, because if it was invalid the result is that the user is only allowed to do *fewer* things.
But as far as I know, modifying the program for your own use in any way does not violate copyright law. So there is no way the GPL can enforce this without itself becoming some kind of contract, legally requiring signing by the parties involved, since agreeing to it actually reduces your rights.
Isn't this the same problem that force the "advertising clause" to be removed from BSD software so that it could be compatable with the GPL?
How long will it be before RedHax offers "Enterprise" Releases, support, etc. that are priced only slightly below similar offerings from Microsoft?
They already do this.
I have used far more Linux systems where the software was bought from RedHat or another company, often installed in place of a Windows copy that was already paid for (thus it cost more than Windows, no matter how cheap the RedHat was). My own home system I avoided the Windows tax, but I have paid for two copies of Mandrake so far. The fact that you believe "free as in beer" is the reason people are using Linux shows that you really don't know what you are talking about.
The parents will be required to connect the original camera to the internet in order for the grandparents to see the video. And only one playback at a time. Unfortunatly, the masses will probably accept this.
All possible benifits of a PK encryption chip can be achieved if the computer user is given a printout of the private key, or is allowed to change the private key.
The simple fact is that as long as the key is a secret only known to the manufacturer this is pure evil, designed specifically to make it impossible for the user to do something with their computer.
It should also be blatently obvious that manufacturers who saw nothing wrong with putting modems or sound waveform generation or NIC functions onto the CPU in order to save a buck on hardware, are certainly not providing hardware to do PK encryption because it will make a better machine. So any claims about how this will benifit the user, in particular claims that can obviously be done by code running on the CPU, are by definition suspect.
I copied the entire exploit (everything between and including the <HTML><SCRIPT>) into a file and tried loading it into Firefox as file:/filename. All I get is a blank page. I would think that even if my Firefox is patched, I would see the "Click here if you want to run the actual exploit" button.
Guess I am too incompetent to be a script kiddie...
Believe me, it was WELL established that the way to make a powerful home computer was to use a portable operating sytem bought from an operating system vendor.
Sigh. It's probably a hopeless cause to get history right. Way too many people seem to think the computer and software and operating systems were invented about 1986 by Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
Seriously, what changes in FF are you making that require you to restart it each time.
I think he is talking about the fact that FF requires you to OK the preferences dialog in order to test if you set things right. I do find this very annoying, it's not very user friendly because often moving a control such as the font or colors and looking directly at the results is much faster and clearer. (I have not tried Opera so I don't know if it does not have this problem).
The only problem is having a hetereogeneous environment increases your support costs whether you have a security incursion or not. How many people are security experts in Mac, Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris, FreeBSD and CPM? Not many. Which means that for every environment your IT staff supports, you need additional admins.
Even if your company is 100% Windows, the world itself could be much more hetrogeneous, if perhaps other companies were 100% Mac or 100% Linux, or 100% some in-house system that nobody else knows about. For each company it would not be harder to manage than today, and we would all be much safer with this.
This is what we do. I'm not claiming it's perfect, but our software has been installed on several Linux distributions we have never even seen, with no problems.
1. Link the program with "-Wl,--rpath,'$${ORIGIN}'" This makes it look in the same directory as the program itself for shared libraries, as though you set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to that directory.
1a. If your program needs other info, use readlink("/proc/self/exe") to find out where you are. Delete everything after the last slash and put the name of your configuration file there and you have the name of it.
2. Put the executable into a directory named after your app. Copy all the.so files that you think the user will not have from/usr/lib into this same directory. In our case this is libtcl8.4.so and libfreetype.so.6 and the libraries used by the Intel C compiler (libcxaguard.so.5, libimf.so, libsvml.so). Put all the configuration files in there as well. Make sure it works without LD_LIBRARY_PATH set (use ldd on the executable to see what it is using).
3. Write some kind of installer that lets the user select where this directory is and unpacks the data there. If you want it to work from the command line the installer can also make a symbolic link from/usr/bin to the executable. In our case we used a self-extracting zip file, where the executable is tacked onto the start and normal libzip is used to extract it (we statically link libz and stuff so we are sure it works).
4. If the user can't stand the fact that the wrong.so file is used, they can go in the app directory and rename the local copy so it is not found and their system one is found.
5. If an end user complains that it does not work, they will probably have an error message telling you exactly the name of the.so file that is missing. Add that to your future distributions, and give them a copy to put in their app directory.
The idea is that it is like you pushed a big rock over the edge of a cliff. Though you had enough power to push it up a few centimeters, it does not mean you have enough power to stop it falling.
Not that I necessarily agree with the article which I didn't read:-) But I'm pretty certain that is the argument. (My personal feeling is that eventually everybody on Earth will work on a unbelievably huge public works project to build some machine in the ocean or whatever is necessary to fix the environment, and thus we WILL stop it. However things will be REALLY BAD before this happens, so it does not mean we should not be concerned).
I assumme you are joking, but in case you are not, there is not enough water to cover all the land, or even the majority of it. This would require raising the level by several miles.
Even worse, you are wrong that floating ice will melt and lower the water. In fact the water level will not change, as the ice displaces exactly it's own weight of water. (actually the floating ice also displaces a small amount of air which lifts it, so I think this means the water will go up a microscopic amount, but I am not sure of this)
Or at least I call it a "tiled" interface, I don't know what, if any, official name for this is. Certainly the vast majority of programs use this style of interface, espeically MFC ones. Modern MSWord is an obvious example, but if you assumme the attached menubar at the top of a Windows or Linux program is a toolbar (which it is) then even very old programs are tiled. All the tools are neatly placed along the edges of the windows with a rectangular area in the middle for the actual image. In some cases the tools can be moved around by dragging them, but they will "snap" to a new position so the window remains tiled and all the regions are still rectangles.
One big confusion is a LOT of people call this "MDI" which it isn't. "MDI" means the toolbars are shared by several documents, which either tile or overlap in that center rectangular area. This is pretty much proven to be a bad idea and I believe is just a holdover from Windows3 or so where it was done as a trick to limit the need to swap in programs that were not being used just to update exposed background areas. In a "tiled" window a new document gets it's own toolbars. Modern MSWord does this by default, so does virtually every other program I have seen except IDE's.
The big problem with "tiled" is that the tools are very constrained in what shape they will be. Often some weird things have to be done so that the information can be presented in a fixed-width and very narrow rectangle. More importantly nobody has figured out any easy way to let the user resize them and thus varible-sized displays are impossible and have to be relegated to popup modal dialog boxes. Another problem with tiled is that you usually cannot use the full screen area for your document as the program either cannot hide the toolbars or is unusable without some visible.
The alternative, which was used by almost all X11 and Macintosh applications until Windows95 started doing tiled/MDI is "floating" tools. These are normal windows that can be moved around using the exact same mechanism as the main document, and can be resized. The big defect is that they obscure parts of your document and the user usually has to move them around to reproduce a fake tiled layout just to see it.
Also due to a horrible bad, bad, bug in Windows and modern X11 window managers, where clicking a window raises it without any way for the program to stop it, you are unable to use the same tools for multiple documents, thus defeating a very important advantage of floating windows. I suspect a lot of Gimp's problems was that the designers were hoping this bug would be fixed, but it is getting worse every year with each new window manager.
This is for the simple reason that any attempt to "innovate" results in people complaining that it is "hard to use" and "confusing" and "unfamiliar". These are the exact same complainers like you who will immediatly turn around and say "open source does not innovate" as soon as a clone of a Windows product is produced.
I have no idea if the Gimp interface is any good (I have been quite confused by it, but I can't figure out PhotoShop either). But I do know that several good ideas are buried because they will "confuse" the poor Windows user. Point-to-type is one, and having clicking on windows NOT raise them is another. Both of these are seriously limiting the ability to make good user interfaces and forcing kludges like MDI and tiled layouts. You probably did not use X11 applications 10 years ago, but I did, and believe me we have lost as much innovation as we have gained from Microsoft!
Sorry I was probably confused by the Slashdot system as to which one I was responding to. If you don't look at -1 it often deletes enough information that you reply to the wrong one, and I often hit the wrong "reply" button (there is one at the top of the page and under each letter).
In any case, if the set of files that POSIX programs use is different than the Windows one, then the result is exactly as though a seperate computer was running the POSIX programs with no network connection to the first one. If Microsoft had sold both a Windows box and a Linux box with no network card with some screws holding them together and then claimed that this made Windows "POSIX compatable" I think it would have been clear how useless that was.
It looks like the "Alpha book" about wgl and also information about glx (the X-specific GL interface) have been added to the new Red book. They are in my copy of 5 but not in the version 3 copy I also have.
Slashdot Mirror
I just find that doubtful, because FreeDOS is not installed. Is it going to come with instructions on how to install FreeDOS, and how to install Linux (or Windows) in such a way that FreeDOS is not wiped? Are the instructions going to point out that if you don't follow them you will lose customer support? If the instructions don't point this out I think they may be in for a lawsuit. If the instructions do point it out, then they are going to get *more* calls from people asking how to install FreeDOS and install Linux over it (I certainly would call). Therefore the only logical conclusion is that they are either prepared to support the nearly 100% of these machines that won't have FreeDos correctly installed, or they are not going to support these machines whatsoever. In neither case does FreeDOS save them money, so it does not explain it.
Your explanation makes sense if FreeDOS runs off it's CD without touching the hard disk. But then it would not need to be "installed". It is possible that their announcement is badly worded, they should clearly state the benifits of including the FreeDOS disk and not mention that it is "not installed".
FlexLM is very easy to break compared to the typical copy protection you will get on a game. It's purpose is to keep reasonably honest people in line and allow them to control shared licenses from a central server in such a way that the number can be easily increased or decreased.
I believe Maya relies on the fact that the license is easy to break. This gets a lot of home users to learn how to use Maya before they get a job in computer graphics, which greatly increases their market share.
Incidentally, the cracking program for Windows will produce a license that works for the Linux version on a machine with the same MAC address.
Unbelievable that 3 different Microsoft apologists have said that "FreeDOS" is necessary for testing the machine. That would make sense if it was *installed*. It's not, the disk is blank. RTFA.
And another person said the reason FreeDOS was included instead of NOTHING is because they don't want to support Linux. CLUE: installing NOTHING means you don't have to support Linux *or* FreeDOS.
In fact something is screwy. And the Microsoft apologists are really scrambling to explain away the real reasons, which the original poster certainly nailed.
Linux started from scratch, which left lots of interesting development to do that was already complete on BSD. That brought a lot of talented developers to the table that would have been bored working with BSDs existing framework.
Now you are just being silly. Tell you what, I am going to start, right now, a new OS that is sure to be more popular than Linux, by your logic. It is fully BSD licensed. And it will get most of the talented developers, because *all* the interesting work needs to be done! Not like that boring old Linux where interesting stuff has already been done.
Kinda like music?
Yes. Exactly like music!
Playing music is not a copyright violation. Smashing the disk into pieces is not a copyright violation. Copying it to backup is not a copyright violation. Editing it into a new piece of music that you listen to yourself is not a copyright violation.
Giving a copy to your friends, or uploading it so others can get it, is a copyright violation.
Get it? It really is blatently obvious what the difference is.
More like it is turning *into* a contract. It was a license before this.
I understand the proposal and it is not as dangerous as the FUD-masters say (in particular the proposal is meaningless unless the original author inserts a "download the source" feature).
But there seems to be a huge problem. Currently the GPL is just an exception to copyright law, allowing the receivier to do something with the code that they would not normally be able to do because of copyright. It does not prevent the user from doing anything that is not restricted by copyright or other laws. This makes the GPL completely legally bulletproof, because if it was invalid the result is that the user is only allowed to do *fewer* things.
But as far as I know, modifying the program for your own use in any way does not violate copyright law. So there is no way the GPL can enforce this without itself becoming some kind of contract, legally requiring signing by the parties involved, since agreeing to it actually reduces your rights.
Isn't this the same problem that force the "advertising clause" to be removed from BSD software so that it could be compatable with the GPL?
How long will it be before RedHax offers "Enterprise" Releases, support, etc. that are priced only slightly below similar offerings from Microsoft?
They already do this.
I have used far more Linux systems where the software was bought from RedHat or another company, often installed in place of a Windows copy that was already paid for (thus it cost more than Windows, no matter how cheap the RedHat was). My own home system I avoided the Windows tax, but I have paid for two copies of Mandrake so far. The fact that you believe "free as in beer" is the reason people are using Linux shows that you really don't know what you are talking about.
The parents will be required to connect the original camera to the internet in order for the grandparents to see the video. And only one playback at a time. Unfortunatly, the masses will probably accept this.
Therefore it is now far faster to download a pirated copy of the CD than to make your own copy. Thus the incentive to buy a CD is *reduced*.
All possible benifits of a PK encryption chip can be achieved if the computer user is given a printout of the private key, or is allowed to change the private key.
The simple fact is that as long as the key is a secret only known to the manufacturer this is pure evil, designed specifically to make it impossible for the user to do something with their computer.
It should also be blatently obvious that manufacturers who saw nothing wrong with putting modems or sound waveform generation or NIC functions onto the CPU in order to save a buck on hardware, are certainly not providing hardware to do PK encryption because it will make a better machine. So any claims about how this will benifit the user, in particular claims that can obviously be done by code running on the CPU, are by definition suspect.
Sorry I don't know much about html scripting.
I copied the entire exploit (everything between and including the <HTML><SCRIPT>) into a file and tried loading it into Firefox as file:/filename. All I get is a blank page. I would think that even if my Firefox is patched, I would see the "Click here if you want to run the actual exploit" button.
Guess I am too incompetent to be a script kiddie...
I guess you never heard of CP/M, huh?
Believe me, it was WELL established that the way to make a powerful home computer was to use a portable operating sytem bought from an operating system vendor.
Sigh. It's probably a hopeless cause to get history right. Way too many people seem to think the computer and software and operating systems were invented about 1986 by Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
Seriously, what changes in FF are you making that require you to restart it each time.
I think he is talking about the fact that FF requires you to OK the preferences dialog in order to test if you set things right. I do find this very annoying, it's not very user friendly because often moving a control such as the font or colors and looking directly at the results is much faster and clearer. (I have not tried Opera so I don't know if it does not have this problem).
The only problem is having a hetereogeneous environment increases your support costs whether you have a security incursion or not. How many people are security experts in Mac, Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris, FreeBSD and CPM? Not many. Which means that for every environment your IT staff supports, you need additional admins.
Even if your company is 100% Windows, the world itself could be much more hetrogeneous, if perhaps other companies were 100% Mac or 100% Linux, or 100% some in-house system that nobody else knows about. For each company it would not be harder to manage than today, and we would all be much safer with this.
Display filenames with forward slashes.
This is what we do. I'm not claiming it's perfect, but our software has been installed on several Linux distributions we have never even seen, with no problems.
.so files that you think the user will not have from /usr/lib into this same directory. In our case this is libtcl8.4.so and libfreetype.so.6 and the libraries used by the Intel C compiler (libcxaguard.so.5, libimf.so, libsvml.so). Put all the configuration files in there as well. Make sure it works without LD_LIBRARY_PATH set (use ldd on the executable to see what it is using).
/usr/bin to the executable. In our case we used a self-extracting zip file, where the executable is tacked onto the start and normal libzip is used to extract it (we statically link libz and stuff so we are sure it works).
.so file is used, they can go in the app directory and rename the local copy so it is not found and their system one is found.
.so file that is missing. Add that to your future distributions, and give them a copy to put in their app directory.
1. Link the program with "-Wl,--rpath,'$${ORIGIN}'" This makes it look in the same directory as the program itself for shared libraries, as though you set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to that directory.
1a. If your program needs other info, use readlink("/proc/self/exe") to find out where you are. Delete everything after the last slash and put the name of your configuration file there and you have the name of it.
2. Put the executable into a directory named after your app. Copy all the
3. Write some kind of installer that lets the user select where this directory is and unpacks the data there. If you want it to work from the command line the installer can also make a symbolic link from
4. If the user can't stand the fact that the wrong
5. If an end user complains that it does not work, they will probably have an error message telling you exactly the name of the
The idea is that it is like you pushed a big rock over the edge of a cliff. Though you had enough power to push it up a few centimeters, it does not mean you have enough power to stop it falling.
:-) But I'm pretty certain that is the argument. (My personal feeling is that eventually everybody on Earth will work on a unbelievably huge public works project to build some machine in the ocean or whatever is necessary to fix the environment, and thus we WILL stop it. However things will be REALLY BAD before this happens, so it does not mean we should not be concerned).
Not that I necessarily agree with the article which I didn't read
I assumme you are joking, but in case you are not, there is not enough water to cover all the land, or even the majority of it. This would require raising the level by several miles.
Most of the polar ice is NOT FLOATING! DUH!
Even worse, you are wrong that floating ice will melt and lower the water. In fact the water level will not change, as the ice displaces exactly it's own weight of water. (actually the floating ice also displaces a small amount of air which lifts it, so I think this means the water will go up a microscopic amount, but I am not sure of this)
Or at least I call it a "tiled" interface, I don't know what, if any, official name for this is. Certainly the vast majority of programs use this style of interface, espeically MFC ones. Modern MSWord is an obvious example, but if you assumme the attached menubar at the top of a Windows or Linux program is a toolbar (which it is) then even very old programs are tiled. All the tools are neatly placed along the edges of the windows with a rectangular area in the middle for the actual image. In some cases the tools can be moved around by dragging them, but they will "snap" to a new position so the window remains tiled and all the regions are still rectangles.
One big confusion is a LOT of people call this "MDI" which it isn't. "MDI" means the toolbars are shared by several documents, which either tile or overlap in that center rectangular area. This is pretty much proven to be a bad idea and I believe is just a holdover from Windows3 or so where it was done as a trick to limit the need to swap in programs that were not being used just to update exposed background areas. In a "tiled" window a new document gets it's own toolbars. Modern MSWord does this by default, so does virtually every other program I have seen except IDE's.
The big problem with "tiled" is that the tools are very constrained in what shape they will be. Often some weird things have to be done so that the information can be presented in a fixed-width and very narrow rectangle. More importantly nobody has figured out any easy way to let the user resize them and thus varible-sized displays are impossible and have to be relegated to popup modal dialog boxes. Another problem with tiled is that you usually cannot use the full screen area for your document as the program either cannot hide the toolbars or is unusable without some visible.
The alternative, which was used by almost all X11 and Macintosh applications until Windows95 started doing tiled/MDI is "floating" tools. These are normal windows that can be moved around using the exact same mechanism as the main document, and can be resized. The big defect is that they obscure parts of your document and the user usually has to move them around to reproduce a fake tiled layout just to see it.
Also due to a horrible bad, bad, bug in Windows and modern X11 window managers, where clicking a window raises it without any way for the program to stop it, you are unable to use the same tools for multiple documents, thus defeating a very important advantage of floating windows. I suspect a lot of Gimp's problems was that the designers were hoping this bug would be fixed, but it is getting worse every year with each new window manager.
This is for the simple reason that any attempt to "innovate" results in people complaining that it is "hard to use" and "confusing" and "unfamiliar". These are the exact same complainers like you who will immediatly turn around and say "open source does not innovate" as soon as a clone of a Windows product is produced.
I have no idea if the Gimp interface is any good (I have been quite confused by it, but I can't figure out PhotoShop either). But I do know that several good ideas are buried because they will "confuse" the poor Windows user. Point-to-type is one, and having clicking on windows NOT raise them is another. Both of these are seriously limiting the ability to make good user interfaces and forcing kludges like MDI and tiled layouts. You probably did not use X11 applications 10 years ago, but I did, and believe me we have lost as much innovation as we have gained from Microsoft!
The tabs would not be any wider if they made the "favorite icon" also be the close box.
Sorry I was probably confused by the Slashdot system as to which one I was responding to. If you don't look at -1 it often deletes enough information that you reply to the wrong one, and I often hit the wrong "reply" button (there is one at the top of the page and under each letter).
In any case, if the set of files that POSIX programs use is different than the Windows one, then the result is exactly as though a seperate computer was running the POSIX programs with no network connection to the first one. If Microsoft had sold both a Windows box and a Linux box with no network card with some screws holding them together and then claimed that this made Windows "POSIX compatable" I think it would have been clear how useless that was.
It looks like the "Alpha book" about wgl and also information about glx (the X-specific GL interface) have been added to the new Red book. They are in my copy of 5 but not in the version 3 copy I also have.