Yes, but with more games available to play under Linux, more people will be using Linux to play games. With a significant percentage (e.g. 15%) of people playing under an alternative platform, there will be an incentive to improve the quality of a game under that platform (i.e. make it portable, and provide a native version).
This moves Linux closer to that 15% (or whatever magic number is needed).
The people in the US Government who need to know if Windows is secure and backdoor-free most surely have access to all the source code they need.
Then, assuming they do the sane thing and audit it, how does the hack change anything? One of the points I was making was that there is only a security hole if the U.S. government is already being stupid.
So the U.S. government trusts every single Microsoft employee with the authority to make changes to the source code?
Whether or not an intruder gained access to the source, the U.S. government would be fools to trust something for sensitive operations without performing a full security audit on the source themselves.
Hmm... no. I was referring to individual companies that base their entire product line around a single product (MS-Windows). If that product was withdrawn, then all of their software would cease to function immediately. If an individual company withdrew a product that ran on Windows, then Windows would still survive. If a software apps company used a cross-platform library, or had other products that ran on different platforms, then the company would not be (as) reliant on MS, and would not be a parasite.
However, if you are speaking in more general terms, then yes, software apps companies and OS companies form a symbiotic relationship, as do software and hardware companies.
It would be nice if the game developers would actually use a cross-platform engine to begin with, but I guess we can't have everything. Actually, this could help Linux become more mainstream. If the game companies see that Windows isn't the only OS out there being used to play games with, perhaps they will think more about not being an MS parasite (not a flame, if they are totally dependent on MS to survive, then they are a parasite).
I hope they can make the Street Performer variant work well - it seems to me that people are putting a gigantic amount of effort into an ultimately doomed attempt at copy-control, and not enough into actually figuring out what to do for money when copyright has completely broken down.
There is a flaw with your analogy: you aren't actually buying the domain name. You are paying a company to tell people where you want the domain to point to, over and over again.
A better analogy would be: it's like paying somebody who owns a plot of land on the corner of a street to put up a signpost telling everyone where you live.
However I also feel that appliance manufacturers should set their sites higher to the same standards as computer browsers.
What is required from an appliance such as a mobile phone, and what is required from a full-fledged computer browser is completely different. "Internet appliances" generally have a much slower connection, and must provide a much quicker response. There is a tiny fraction of screen space available compared with a computer screen. The user is likely to be much less computer literate. The device is used in a different way, for different purposes.
What this all adds up to is...(gasp!) using the internet from a device such as a mobile phone is different from using it from a computer. And usually, different problems require different solutions. Hell, if the manufacturers really think they can manage it, they can always try to implement full XHTML on their devices. While they're at it, they can probably fit in Java applet support as well, right?
Personally I believe this set will go the way of the dodo. Designers will not be too keen on creating yet another version of their sites just to accomodate another markup.
You're missing the point. You can create a single set of xml files to store your content, and two (or more) xsl files, to render into different formats, e.g. xhtml, xhtml basic, pdf, etc.
The ability to learn for himself. Find him a problem to solve, that you know he cannot solve with his current knowledge. Make sure he has enough books and other material to learn how to solve it. Make it interesting (building a robot or something:). And FFS make sure he doesn't burn out - teach him how to take time off.
There are a few rules, and you include a DTD to interpret any particular implementation of XML.
No, not quite. The DTD basically just says what the valid tags are for a certain XML dialect. To actually "understand" the information requires an application to parse the XML file, or use a component that does this.
The company I'm presently working at has been using a specific implementation of XML for communication between servers, and they owe nothing to MSFT or Sun because of it. What exactly have these two companies done?
They were partially responsible for developing the XML standard. They supply free parsers for you to use in your own projects. They implement XML support in their products.
I find the article vague at best. Have they provided XML interpreters?
As far as I can tell, they have both implemented a way for businesses to communicate in certain ways, using the XML standard. These ways are incompatible with each other, so presumably, applications will have to have different code to support each standard. I suppose it's like the way a web browser is expected to support both GIF and PNG images - the formats do the same job, but do it in different ways.
On another note, we're not, in general, as concerned with privacy here in the UK as much as you guys are in the US.
I wouldn't say that. What about all of the data privacy laws that we've had since '84, and the U.S. government is only just catching up to? CCTV is a different matter to these types of laws, they can directly deter violent crimes, even when the cameras aren't recording.
Which brings me to my point: What the hell?!? These two so called WC3 complaint browsers won't display code created in a WC3 compliant editor the same way!
The HTML+CSS1 standards never intended to provide a pixel-perfect presentation layer. If you want that use Postscript, PDF, or XML+XSL+FO.
What use are these bloody standards?
So that user agents (which can include non-graphical browsers and search engines) can interpret pages and render them appropriately. Despite what you seem to think, this doesn't imply that the same page should render in the same way for different people. Even the CSS specification refers to CSS styles as suggestions.
So a script kiddie... breaks into my system with a well-documented hole that I haven't plugged up yet.... Big freakin' deal.
Well, yeah, it would be a big deal if they erased your hard drive, as Mike pointed out. But if you take into account how many people "the average user" accounts for, then what happens when they are all used as part of a DDOS? It's a big deal, especially if you are on the recieving end.
While many companies may have similar names, but dissimilar URL's, finding them online can be hard. If you have a brochure or manual with a service phone number (or any number, really), you just punch that in on the address line and viola!
OK, and if you had the brochure/manual handy, what is stopping you from punching in the web address from it?
Except for the fact that the average user... have absolutely no need for high-encryption in everyday email transfers.
The average user has no need, and the only thing that encryption does to that user is make him look suspicious.
That's one of the main reasons for widespread, everyday email encryption. So that when you do need to encrypt something, it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb.
I've always argued that the general geek/Open Source community it very paranoid when it comes to things like encryption.
Paranoia is necessary if you are to consider anything secure. Otherwise, it's just 'obscure something and keep your fingers crossed'.
So I, Joe User, encrypt my email on my home machine. What's going to stop the FBI from peeking through the window and looking at the screen...
Can they do that for every person in the country at the same time?
The letter talks about "converting all the gnome users" a couple of times, and I really think this is the wrong attitude.
So does the person who wrote it:
...given that Linux has less
than 5% of the overall desktop market we should rather target the 95% of desktop users than compete with our friends from the GNOME project.
Just converting 5% of Windows users will get us more KDE users than converting all GNOME users.
What they *should* be doing is trying to make things like DnD work between gnome and kde apps, as well as sharing components, themes, etc.
I thought DND was sorted out, KDE2 can use GTK themes. GNOME using KOM/KParts, or KDE using Bonobo is unlikely. However, there is work being done in other areas, such as the joint.desktop format.
If I like randomgnomemailer, but I do my PIM in randomkdepim, I'd like to share or at least transfer information between the two.
Well the latest konqueror can import (and export, I believe) Netscape bookmarks, so it's a start. But I think that things like addressbooks, bookmarks, email, etc, should be treated as documents rather than configuration for specific programs, and they should be usable outside of a GUI.
This is where microsoft and windows has it right... things are generally more "user friendly" because there are no gotchas ("sorry, you can't use this program without this other program installed)
What? MS does this too, it's standard practice to rely on other components - otherwise everything would go to hell. What would you rather people do, statically link every program? Ever install something that needed a new DirectX, or a VB runtime DLL?
How is this different to Sun's Network Computer idea? Or, more importantly, would they have opened up StarOffice if they didn't think that moving to this business model would be effective?
You can simulate ACL's through users/groups/ownership/permissions just fine.
No you can't. How can you have a file that is owned by user 'alex', readable by user 'bob', writable by user 'carol', and not readable by anybody else?
Well then the engine won't show any of your files, including potentially illegal ones, so the engine will work as intended in the sense that it'll still only be legal mp3s.
OK, what about configuring your server to return random noise to the search engine subnets, but the real MP3s to other people?
Or to put it another way: Qt makes a fellow choose two out of three from the set {free software, available now, available on both Windows and POSIX+X11}.
But the original argument was that QT restricted people's freedoms because the GPLed version didn't run on windows yet. Which is silly. Is GTK+ less free than QT because it doesn't have the equivelant to QT/Embedded (which is also available under the GPL)? Of course not, it's just that GTK+ and QT have different feature sets. It's not a question of freedom.
No, no, no! A free Windows port would kill TrollTech. TT (judging from the outside, Qt's API, for instance--which is the best I've used) assembled a great team of programmers and is paying them to work on the free version of Qt by letting the corporations that can afford it pay for a Windows version
Yes, but that only applies if you assume that the majority of people buying the licenses would release their code under the GPL, which isn't likely. What it would do, however, is bring a large amount of Free software to Windows.
Wrong. At the very least, there are a good set of bindings for Python, I believe there are also Perl bindings.
QT is only truly Free on Unix.
So? It's truly Free, so you can port it yourself if you want to. There's a lot of Unix-only Free software, I don't hear you moaning about how GNOME only runs on Unix.
GTK works fine on many platforms
QT works fine on many platforms. X is not required, either.
Does this increse my freedom as a programmer? (Can I apply skills/knowledge of this undertaking to other projects/applications/platforms?)
What makes you think that you cannot do this with QT? Trolltech also sells QT under a license that allows non-free programs to be written with QT. How does this magically remove all your knowledge of QT once you have completed a project?
Does this increase my users freedom? (Can they run in in Windows, etc?)
QT works on windows. You only need to pay for QT if you develop with it, and don't want to port it yourself.
Had they tried to make a standards-compliant release before devoting their effort to Mozilla, we'd still be at least a year away from seeing a stable, fully functional release of Mozilla.
Since Mozilla is the devname for the Netscape browser, I assume you mean we'd be a year away from a stable release of a Mozilla that has the same features as it has right now?
What new standards? They've been getting the support for the oldest standards down first and then moving forward from there. Yes, they've been adding features and stuff as well,
OK, just stop there for a sec. This is my point - they should have given the bug fixes priority over new features (obviously keeping existing features is a must), and then released NS5.
but when you've got a lot of developers working for free, and the rest working to produce something that consumers will want to use, you pretty much have to add the features.
Yes, because nobody would use a browser that didn't have inbuilt terminals and a non-native interface...</sarcasm>
They could crank out a browser that adheres to standards, but doesn't have many features, and then nobody would want to use it, so it wouldn't really be helping anyone.
This isn't about removing features - just not adding everything some random hacker produces a patch for into the codebase. That is my point - the first release after opening the source should have been to simply let web developers write standards-compliant code without hobbling their code and writing convoluted workarounds for Netscape.
Better to just let them get the final product out when it's finished. Maybe it will serve as an incentive for Microsoft to finally start adhering to standards as well.
Microsoft have released three revisions of Internet Explorer since Mozilla was opened, and each one of them supported HTML, CSS and DOM better than Netscape.
Slashdot Mirror
It still is Windows, just emulated.
Yes, but with more games available to play under Linux, more people will be using Linux to play games. With a significant percentage (e.g. 15%) of people playing under an alternative platform, there will be an incentive to improve the quality of a game under that platform (i.e. make it portable, and provide a native version).
This moves Linux closer to that 15% (or whatever magic number is needed).
The people in the US Government who need to know if Windows is secure and backdoor-free most surely have access to all the source code they need.
Then, assuming they do the sane thing and audit it, how does the hack change anything? One of the points I was making was that there is only a security hole if the U.S. government is already being stupid.
So the U.S. government trusts every single Microsoft employee with the authority to make changes to the source code?
Whether or not an intruder gained access to the source, the U.S. government would be fools to trust something for sensitive operations without performing a full security audit on the source themselves.
Hmm... no. I was referring to individual companies that base their entire product line around a single product (MS-Windows). If that product was withdrawn, then all of their software would cease to function immediately. If an individual company withdrew a product that ran on Windows, then Windows would still survive. If a software apps company used a cross-platform library, or had other products that ran on different platforms, then the company would not be (as) reliant on MS, and would not be a parasite.
However, if you are speaking in more general terms, then yes, software apps companies and OS companies form a symbiotic relationship, as do software and hardware companies.
It would be nice if the game developers would actually use a cross-platform engine to begin with, but I guess we can't have everything. Actually, this could help Linux become more mainstream. If the game companies see that Windows isn't the only OS out there being used to play games with, perhaps they will think more about not being an MS parasite (not a flame, if they are totally dependent on MS to survive, then they are a parasite).
I hope they can make the Street Performer variant work well - it seems to me that people are putting a gigantic amount of effort into an ultimately doomed attempt at copy-control, and not enough into actually figuring out what to do for money when copyright has completely broken down.
SMIL would probably be a more appropriate replacement for Flash. It's also XML-based, and SMIL 1.0 has been a W3C recommendation for over two years.
There is a flaw with your analogy: you aren't actually buying the domain name. You are paying a company to tell people where you want the domain to point to, over and over again.
A better analogy would be: it's like paying somebody who owns a plot of land on the corner of a street to put up a signpost telling everyone where you live.
However I also feel that appliance manufacturers should set their sites higher to the same standards as computer browsers.
What is required from an appliance such as a mobile phone, and what is required from a full-fledged computer browser is completely different. "Internet appliances" generally have a much slower connection, and must provide a much quicker response. There is a tiny fraction of screen space available compared with a computer screen. The user is likely to be much less computer literate. The device is used in a different way, for different purposes.
What this all adds up to is...(gasp!) using the internet from a device such as a mobile phone is different from using it from a computer. And usually, different problems require different solutions. Hell, if the manufacturers really think they can manage it, they can always try to implement full XHTML on their devices. While they're at it, they can probably fit in Java applet support as well, right?
Personally I believe this set will go the way of the dodo. Designers will not be too keen on creating yet another version of their sites just to accomodate another markup.
You're missing the point. You can create a single set of xml files to store your content, and two (or more) xsl files, to render into different formats, e.g. xhtml, xhtml basic, pdf, etc.
The ability to learn for himself. Find him a problem to solve, that you know he cannot solve with his current knowledge. Make sure he has enough books and other material to learn how to solve it. Make it interesting (building a robot or something :). And FFS make sure he doesn't burn out - teach him how to take time off.
I thought XML already had a standard definition.
It does.
There are a few rules, and you include a DTD to interpret any particular implementation of XML.
No, not quite. The DTD basically just says what the valid tags are for a certain XML dialect. To actually "understand" the information requires an application to parse the XML file, or use a component that does this.
The company I'm presently working at has been using a specific implementation of XML for communication between servers, and they owe nothing to MSFT or Sun because of it. What exactly have these two companies done?
They were partially responsible for developing the XML standard. They supply free parsers for you to use in your own projects. They implement XML support in their products.
I find the article vague at best. Have they provided XML interpreters?
As far as I can tell, they have both implemented a way for businesses to communicate in certain ways, using the XML standard. These ways are incompatible with each other, so presumably, applications will have to have different code to support each standard. I suppose it's like the way a web browser is expected to support both GIF and PNG images - the formats do the same job, but do it in different ways.
On another note, we're not, in general, as concerned with privacy here in the UK as much as you guys are in the US.
I wouldn't say that. What about all of the data privacy laws that we've had since '84, and the U.S. government is only just catching up to? CCTV is a different matter to these types of laws, they can directly deter violent crimes, even when the cameras aren't recording.
Which brings me to my point: What the hell?!? These two so called WC3 complaint browsers won't display code created in a WC3 compliant editor the same way!
The HTML+CSS1 standards never intended to provide a pixel-perfect presentation layer. If you want that use Postscript, PDF, or XML+XSL+FO.
What use are these bloody standards?
So that user agents (which can include non-graphical browsers and search engines) can interpret pages and render them appropriately. Despite what you seem to think, this doesn't imply that the same page should render in the same way for different people. Even the CSS specification refers to CSS styles as suggestions.
So a script kiddie... breaks into my system with a well-documented hole that I haven't plugged up yet.... Big freakin' deal.
Well, yeah, it would be a big deal if they erased your hard drive, as Mike pointed out. But if you take into account how many people "the average user" accounts for, then what happens when they are all used as part of a DDOS? It's a big deal, especially if you are on the recieving end.
While many companies may have similar names, but dissimilar URL's, finding them online can be hard. If you have a brochure or manual with a service phone number (or any number, really), you just punch that in on the address line and viola!
OK, and if you had the brochure/manual handy, what is stopping you from punching in the web address from it?
Except for the fact that the average user... have absolutely no need for high-encryption in everyday email transfers.
The average user has no need, and the only thing that encryption does to that user is make him look suspicious.
That's one of the main reasons for widespread, everyday email encryption. So that when you do need to encrypt something, it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb.
I've always argued that the general geek/Open Source community it very paranoid when it comes to things like encryption.
Paranoia is necessary if you are to consider anything secure. Otherwise, it's just 'obscure something and keep your fingers crossed'.
So I, Joe User, encrypt my email on my home machine. What's going to stop the FBI from peeking through the window and looking at the screen...
Can they do that for every person in the country at the same time?
The letter talks about "converting all the gnome users" a couple of times, and I really think this is the wrong attitude.
So does the person who wrote it:
What they *should* be doing is trying to make things like DnD work between gnome and kde apps, as well as sharing components, themes, etc.
I thought DND was sorted out, KDE2 can use GTK themes. GNOME using KOM/KParts, or KDE using Bonobo is unlikely. However, there is work being done in other areas, such as the joint .desktop format.
If I like randomgnomemailer, but I do my PIM in randomkdepim, I'd like to share or at least transfer information between the two.
Well the latest konqueror can import (and export, I believe) Netscape bookmarks, so it's a start. But I think that things like addressbooks, bookmarks, email, etc, should be treated as documents rather than configuration for specific programs, and they should be usable outside of a GUI.
This is where microsoft and windows has it right... things are generally more "user friendly" because there are no gotchas ("sorry, you can't use this program without this other program installed)
What? MS does this too, it's standard practice to rely on other components - otherwise everything would go to hell. What would you rather people do, statically link every program? Ever install something that needed a new DirectX, or a VB runtime DLL?
How is this different to Sun's Network Computer idea? Or, more importantly, would they have opened up StarOffice if they didn't think that moving to this business model would be effective?
OK, you got me. When I said "readable by bob", what I meant was "only readable by bob", i.e. not writable or executable.
You can simulate ACL's through users/groups/ownership/permissions just fine.
No you can't. How can you have a file that is owned by user 'alex', readable by user 'bob', writable by user 'carol', and not readable by anybody else?
Well then the engine won't show any of your files, including potentially illegal ones, so the engine will work as intended in the sense that it'll still only be legal mp3s.
OK, what about configuring your server to return random noise to the search engine subnets, but the real MP3s to other people?
Or to put it another way: Qt makes a fellow choose two out of three from the set {free software, available now, available on both Windows and POSIX+X11}.
But the original argument was that QT restricted people's freedoms because the GPLed version didn't run on windows yet. Which is silly. Is GTK+ less free than QT because it doesn't have the equivelant to QT/Embedded (which is also available under the GPL)? Of course not, it's just that GTK+ and QT have different feature sets. It's not a question of freedom.
No, no, no! A free Windows port would kill TrollTech. TT (judging from the outside, Qt's API, for instance--which is the best I've used) assembled a great team of programmers and is paying them to work on the free version of Qt by letting the corporations that can afford it pay for a Windows version
Yes, but that only applies if you assume that the majority of people buying the licenses would release their code under the GPL, which isn't likely. What it would do, however, is bring a large amount of Free software to Windows.
QT AFAIK only supports C++
Wrong. At the very least, there are a good set of bindings for Python, I believe there are also Perl bindings.
QT is only truly Free on Unix.
So? It's truly Free, so you can port it yourself if you want to. There's a lot of Unix-only Free software, I don't hear you moaning about how GNOME only runs on Unix.
GTK works fine on many platforms
QT works fine on many platforms. X is not required, either.
Does this increse my freedom as a programmer? (Can I apply skills/knowledge of this undertaking to other projects/applications/platforms?)
What makes you think that you cannot do this with QT? Trolltech also sells QT under a license that allows non-free programs to be written with QT. How does this magically remove all your knowledge of QT once you have completed a project?
Does this increase my users freedom? (Can they run in in Windows, etc?)
QT works on windows. You only need to pay for QT if you develop with it, and don't want to port it yourself.
Had they tried to make a standards-compliant release before devoting their effort to Mozilla, we'd still be at least a year away from seeing a stable, fully functional release of Mozilla.
Since Mozilla is the devname for the Netscape browser, I assume you mean we'd be a year away from a stable release of a Mozilla that has the same features as it has right now?
What new standards? They've been getting the support for the oldest standards down first and then moving forward from there. Yes, they've been adding features and stuff as well,
OK, just stop there for a sec. This is my point - they should have given the bug fixes priority over new features (obviously keeping existing features is a must), and then released NS5.
but when you've got a lot of developers working for free, and the rest working to produce something that consumers will want to use, you pretty much have to add the features.
Yes, because nobody would use a browser that didn't have inbuilt terminals and a non-native interface...</sarcasm>
They could crank out a browser that adheres to standards, but doesn't have many features, and then nobody would want to use it, so it wouldn't really be helping anyone.
This isn't about removing features - just not adding everything some random hacker produces a patch for into the codebase. That is my point - the first release after opening the source should have been to simply let web developers write standards-compliant code without hobbling their code and writing convoluted workarounds for Netscape.
Better to just let them get the final product out when it's finished. Maybe it will serve as an incentive for Microsoft to finally start adhering to standards as well.
Microsoft have released three revisions of Internet Explorer since Mozilla was opened, and each one of them supported HTML, CSS and DOM better than Netscape.