Oops. Sorry to reply to my own comment, but I mistyped in the first paragraph. Prior to woody, a distribution would move from unstable to frozen to stable, not to testing. (obviously, since this was prior to testing, but I want to clarify)
noah
Re:Isn't woody testing now?
on
Debian On DVD
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Prior to the release of Potato, (the current stable) Potato was testing, Slink was stable, and Sid was unstable - woody hadn't been assigned yet.
Nope. woody is the first Debian version ever to be labelled "testing". Before this a distribution (say potato or slink) would go straight from unstable to frozen, then along to testing. Please see the
announcement on debian-devel-announce. Note that it's dated from mid December of last year. That was the first time there ever was a Debian "testing distribution".
Problems in testing are usually found immediately, and patches released - upgrading involves ONE command as root - Compare that to the fiasco that was Redhat 6.0
Nope. The progression of packages from unstable to testing is defined, and does not allow packages to be updated immediately. Packages must be in sid for 2 weeks with no updates and no release-critical bugs submitted against it. This has the side effect, of course, that if a bug is found in woody, it won't be fixed until the fix can propogate from sid to woody.
Consider the recent thread on debian-devel regarding xfree86-common and a bug that completely broke X in woody. This bug made it through the checks, and, despite being submitted to the BTS several times, still made it through into woody.
BTW, I am a Debian developer and member of the Debian security team. We do not release security updates for woody. Period.
noah
Re:Is woody ready for production server?
on
Debian On DVD
·
· Score: 1
Woody is absolutely not ready for a production server. Especially not one that will actually be connected to the internet or have users. The reason for this is that the security team is not repsonsible for anything to do with woody yet. You have no guarantees of any security fixes reaching your system in a timely manner.
If you're really good about keeping up with bugtraq and friends, then maybe, but you're on your own.
noah
Re:Isn't woody testing now?
on
Debian On DVD
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I think that Woody is considered the 'testing' distribution now, not 'unstable'. As a big Woody user, I have found it to be plenty stable.
Woody has always been testing. sid is unstable. Simply because woody is labelled 'testing', though, doesn't mean it's some kind of beta release or release candidate or anything else.
The 'testing' branch is a new thing with Debian, created in part to address the fact that Debian's freeze cycle is often so long that many of the included packages are outdated by the time it's released. The idea is that 'unstable' will filter out the critical bugs, and only reasonably high quality packages will get moved to testing (this happens automatically). Then, when it comes time to prepare an actual release, parts of woody can be frozen incrementally. Right now, for example, the base system is frozen. No new features can be added to it, only bugfixes. But the rest of the system is still undergoing development.
Woody has definitely not always been stable by any means. Recently, for example, X completely broke. Though the fix was simple, the problem was not obvious.
Another problem with using woody is that it is not supported by the security team!!! This means that security fixes are not a priority and don't necessarily make it into the distribution any faster than any other updated package. Using woody in a mission critical server environment would be bad. I use woody on a workstation, though, and have found it to be of pretty good quality. It's rare that something that I expect to work doesn't actually work. But then again, I can say the same thing for sid.
But I don't think Debian's releases are slow enough for you, if you want to switch to FreeBSD. May I recommend Slackware? Stay in Linux and get really slow updates. =)
Hmm. FreeBSD is slower than Debian? I don't think so. What has FreeBSD released in the last 12 months? 4.2, 4.3, and 4.4. What has Debian released in the last 12 months? Nothing.
Granted, the FreeBSD releases are relatively minor, but at least it's something. Nothing frustrates me more than Debian's current release cycle. Don't get me wrong, I love the project and am an active Debian developer, but we never release new versions.
If you choose to not support your own country, then you choose to not support the system that gave you the freedom to choose whom you support.
I don't think that's a good way to look at it. The problem is that the US is not an innocent victim in this situation. The terrorist attack on the US was not the beginning of a new war, but rather a battle in a war that's been going on for years. Try imagining how the people living in the middle east (especially the Arabian countries) view the USA's ongoing involvement in their affairs. It't not too hard to envision them percieving our presence there as a violation of their soverignty.
I believe that protesting further US involvement in the middle east is a wise choice. The US certainly did not appreciate foreign military powers deploying their forces within striking distance of our shores in the past.
(Recall the Cuban Missile Crisis, which occurred when the USSR placed missiles 90 miles from US soil. The US had had missiles nearer than that to Soviet soil, yet nearly started world war 3 when the Soviets placed missiles near our borders.)
I believe that rather than pursue the oxymoronic act of fighting for peace, the US should extend to nations in the middle east the same respect we expect of them: The respect for their sovereignty. Violence will only lead to further violence.
You know, for a group that generally claims to be against software patents, the slashdot crowd seems surprisingly willing to overlook the fact that Google makes rather extensive use of them. I find this disappointing. I like Google, and I think they're really the best search engine available right now, but I feel just a little bit dirty every time I use them.
I live in Boston, a short train ride away from Marlboro. I work at MIT. I love retrocomputing. Why didn't I hear about this event???? Why, to my knowledge, didn't anybody hear about this event? The Wired article mentioned that only a dozen exhibitors and less than a hundred visitors showed up for the thing. Where was it announced? Why weren't there flyers around the campus at MIT advertising it? Was it announced on any newsgroups/mailing lists/websites, etc?
I can't believe I missed it... I know so many others who would love to have been there, too.
no, when a 12 year old picks a fight with a 30 year old karate expert, he is expected to get beaten. It's called competition. It's a fact of life.
It's not the 12 year old that picking the fights. This analogy started with a good one: Microsoft is an essentially invinsible bully roaming the playground beating up on the kids. The kids have no choice whether or not to fight him. That's not called competition. Situations such as this necessitate the intervention of somebody who can enforce some kind of order over the group and stop the bully from causing trouble.
BTW. Even if MS got broken up, linux sure as hell wouldn't take it's place.
Where in this thread has anybody claimed that it would? You're just trolling at this point. There have been several very technically advanced and well engineered operating systems that have failed miserably due to Microsoft's overwhelming control over the market. BeOS, for example, would have been one exciting system to work in, but nobody bought it. The hardware vendors wouldn't write drivers for it because nobody used it (so, therefore, nobody uses it). Nobody wrote commercial apps for it, since nobody used it, meaning that nobody would use it since they couldn't get commercial apps for it.
Microsoft, as the maker of the most popular browser and productivity suite, has the power to dictate what operating systems will succeed in the commercial market today. By keeping Office's file formats propriatary, they are able to ensure that the only people that can reliably read or write Office documents are people using an officially sanctioned MS operating system.
I once saw a user on a lab machine whose prompt was
this-user-left-herself-logged-in-to-[machine]-on -[ date]
The sad sad sad thing was that I saw the same user a couple months later and they had not changed their prompt. She was a computer science grad student.
Some people here have claimed that spam is a legitimate means of reaching potential customers. If that is the case then why do virtually all spammers rely on open mail relays and essentially anonymous throw away hotmail or yahoo email accounts?
If you claim that spam doesn't cost anything, then why aren't you paying for the bandwidth usage yourself?
A couple months ago my ISP unleashed a huge new mail server cluster (biggest mail server cluster I've ever seen, with vast amounts of disk space and processing power). Within just a couple weeks the system ground almost to a halt under the load of a massive spam campaign. That constituted a DoS attack by any definition. If the spam campaign was big enough to take down that monster server farm, then who knows how many smaller mail systems go down daily as a result of similar attacks.
To those who argue that spam is legitimate and doesn't cost anything, try using your own servers and valid email addresses. Maybe then your claims will have some weight.
As for corporations, as long as they stay within the law, and are not using the power of the gun against me (which the government is), they can be as greedy and corrupt as they like.
"within the law"?!?! You, who claim to not trust the government with your money, trust the government to make your laws? Have you looked at the recent trend in laws passed by the government? Copyright law, UCITA, DMCA, etc? Guess what those laws are doing. Giving MORE FREEDOM TO CORPORATIONS. And you can bet that corporations are going to take whatever they can get. Hell, they're the ones lobbying for such laws. Do you really think some senator dreamed up the DMCA?
Do not fear the government. It is merely a pawn of those with money (the corporations). Money is power.
Apt-get is great if all of your packages come from the same place. I have had problems installing debs from other distributions (tossing WordPerfect on my laptop from my Corel distribution). I don't think that there are easy ways around the problems.
But are the problems you had problems with the actual packages, with the archives themselves, or really with apt-get? I suspect it's more likely that the problems were related to Corel's archive. Perhaps they provided e.g. a version of libc that apt-get interpreted as being "newer". It's not apt-gets fault, it's that Corel didn't intend to make it easy for *Debian* users to get the package, they intended to make it easy for *Corel Linux* users to get the packages.
There are several lists available of unofficial apt sources. apt-get is designed to easily handle many sources, related or not. That doesn't mean it's immune to screwed up archives.
This code will cause Windows2000 to use up all available physical/virtual memory, but it won't crash it. It will eventually mess up the current windows session, but to correct it all I have to do is log out and log in again. Linux will crash dead under this program.
Hmm...I think you've been missing out on something all these years. I think you're talking about Minix, when most of the rest of us here are talking about Linux.
What I mean to say is that no, this code will most definitely not crash Linux. In fact, you make me think that Linux probably handles it better than Win2k. I just ran the code on a 120 MHz machine with 16 megs of RAM, and I didn't even need to log out in order to "fix" things. In fact, just for fun I tried running two simultaneous copies of that program...still no problem.
So if I create a product and call it, let's say, FrogSSHit, then I am using the SSH trademark. How does OpenSSH differ from FrogSSHit.
If your product implements a secure remote login capability, then yes, you could get sued. Actually, the way trademark law seem to apply to computers, if your product is at all related to computers you could probably get sued (and lose). Otherwise it's fine. That's why Microsoft isn't about to sue Ford for the "Explorer" or Netscape sue Lincoln for the "Navigator".
I must be living in the dark but until recently I though SSH was ONLY a protocol. There is a company called SSH, that is news to me.
I guess you've been living in the dark then. Check out www.ssh.com and their commercial SSH product.
* Coke - For cola, or in some places, any soda
* Kleenex - for a facial tissue
* Saran Wrap - for cellophane
* Roller Blade- for inline roller skates
* UNIX - for any OS that looks like the work done by AT&T/Bell Labs
Sure, that's fine, and nobody's going to complain if you use the term ssh generically in conversation, as with each of the examples you listed. However, if an independant product was created whose name was clearly derived from "Kleenex", that would be a trademark violation. The same holds true for SSH.
However, SSH wasn't trademarked originally, and even once it was it was never defended. Until now. But by not defending it from the outset, the trademark holder loses the ability to make future claims.
Imagine John Postel deciding, well after SMTP had acheived widespread acceptance, to trademark the term. Then a couple years later he decides to make claims of violations against all the SMTP-talking mail servers out there. (I know John Postel is dead...I couldn't come up with a better example off hand)
I love X. Great and amazing Architecture. Still, it isn't all the way there. It needs more flexibilty. It's hard for me to describe, but I'll try.
You've got me worried already...
* Display backend : controls the hardware
That's the X server
* GUI library : Basically xlib
Huh? Xlib doesn't povide any GUI stuff at all, unless you consider things like rectangles, points, and arcs to be GUI objects. There are no widgets in Xlib; it is not a GUI library. GTK+ and Qt are GUI libraries.
* User Interface Management : controls for the various devices like mice and keyboards
xset and xmodmap
* GUI backend + library communiction : the glue that would tie everything together and allow them to talk, whether it be by network or any other method
Try X protocol. The thing is, X protocol *must* be on a lower level than widgets or other UI components. If it was up to the higher level stuff, then things like KDE and GNOME simply could not co-exist unless they worked out a new standard for network display. But they've already got a standard in X protocol.
A small question now: does X allow you to make a multi-docment interface (1 big app window, with several document windows that are constrained to within the window). I've been wondering about that for a while. I've seen nothing to say it can, but I still wonder.
Yes, you can "swallow" objects. I don't know if it still does it, but StarOffice used to essentially embed MWM within a window, so you had what ammounted to a StarOffice workspace in which you could iconify, maximize, re-organize, whatever the sub windows. Basically (though I've never actually written code to do it) I believe you just create an MWM widget that is a child of some other manager widget. Afterstep does something similar with whole programs with its "wharf" module. It can be done...Somebody else will probably give you better info on this.
Re: widget-set independence Sorry, this is just about the most annoying thing about X for most end-users, and there is always somebody who jumps up trying to defend it. I don't want every program to use a different widget set. I do want my programs to be able to support basic cut-and-paste. I want good support for scalable fonts.
What is X? It's not a GUI. It was not designed to be a GUI. With that in mind, why on earth should it impose GUI standards? It shouldn't! Now, pick a GUI. Use GNOME for example. It uses the same widget set, can cut&paste between widgets, etc etc. Same is true for KDE. It could be argued that there's no real need for interoperability between those GUIs. Just because they're both based on the same low-level framework doesn't mean they need to do the same things with it. Still, though, even with the many different GUIs available for X, copy&paste works quite well. Lots of effort has been put in to making such things work.
Re: extensions for 3D, anti-aliased text, etc. Having a general extension mechanism is a good thing. Needing to use it to provide basic functionality isn't such a good thing.
You've got to remember when X was designed. In the 80's, while anti-aliasing did exist, computers really didn't have the processing power to use it comfortably. Same holds true for 3D animation. Can you think of any other GUI frameworks from that era that are still in use? The fact that X, a framework made with no support at all for the "basic functionality" of anti-aliased fonts and 3D animation, can be made to take advantage of new technologies simply by providing an appropriate plugin is really quite amazing.
Having said all that, though, I really do want to see good things from Berlin. I would like to see a more modern framework in use. There's a lot of ancient legacy stuff in X that just isn't used anymore, and unfortunately there's no way to "unplug" such functionality similar to the way you can plug in new functionality.
MRTG? Hah! That's not only obsolete but even the original author has ditched it for something better. Check out RRDtool and any of the many many front ends available. I use Cricket myself, and have found it to be *very* cool.
...Cricket is so cool, in fact, that I had a thoroughly wonderful time at LISA informing a vendor that their product was just about completely useless because it didn't do anything that I wasn't already doing with cricket! By the end of it they even agreed with me that that their features did provide any advantage over cricket. I don't remember who they were, though...
Why 0.1? Why not 0.0000000001? Version numbering is completely arbitrary. Just ask RMS or whoever decided that Emacs would skip about 10 whole versions several years back. And then look at Debian's apt-get tool, which is very solid and robust, and it's only on version 0.3.19 or something. It's meaningless.
does this new code integration mean that Debian will have to move KDE into non-free again? I never see the licence issues with this discussed (this stuff was announced before). ViaVioce is not Free Software. So, how do they plan to solve this?
KDE and Qt can *never* be forced back to non-free. They're both GPLed. There's no way to undo that. If they tried integrating non-GPL code with Qt/KDE, they'd be violating the GPL. Therefore they have no choice but to release their code under the GPL.
I get the point, I just strongly disagree with it. Code needs to be readable in order to be useful. I aknowledged Mel's skill and creativity in my original post, but I stick to my point: he was a poor engineer. I'm sure you've heard the quote "If builders
built buildings the way programmers write programs, the first woodpecker
to come along would destroy civilization." That describes Mel's coding style perfectly. Make the tiniest change to the system it's running on and the whole thing falls apart, requiring a complete rewrite. That's rediculous.
I don't know where in my post you find any reference to debuggers that hold your hand or some kind of context sensitive help system or whatever. I sure never mentioned that. I'm just saying that Mel was a bad programmer because his code was unnecessarily obfuscated and completely inflexible. It has nothing to do with what tools he did or did not use. Obfuscated, inflexible code can be written with the latest GUI IDE. It doesn't take an old timer with a hex editor, and any hack value it has is quickly lost when you're the one tasked with figuring out why the code won't work after upgrading the system.
This classic hacker legend came up in a software design class while at Northeastern. It was used as an example of terrible coding practice. Sure, Mel was an artist, and an incredibly skilled programmer, but his code was completely unreadable. Unless you're one of those people who follows the "if I write unreadable code then they can never replace me" school of thought for job security then you should definitely not look up to Mel.
Where is the outrage of the GPL advocates when BSD code has its copyrights removed and a GPL license put on instead?
There's no reason for outrage because the BSDL allows this! If they author of the code didn't want to allow re-licensing then they wouldn't have chosen the BSD license in the first place. The only thing required by the BSD license is that credit be given. You're free to re-license it under the GPL or some proprietary license or whatever license you can cook up.
The GPL on the other hand, does not allow this. That's explicit. That's one reason why some people choose the GPL: it guarantees that their code will always be free.
I don't see this as having a big impact on security. Mostly I expect they'll just be faxing around BugTraq posts. This is because most of the real vulnerabilities are not found by the software vendor but by users.
I think this is more of a publicity thing. Over the past year or so there have been some pretty high-profile security problems that have made the software industry look pretty bad ('oh my, the mighty Microsoft got "hacked"'). I think they're just doing this so the general public thinks that they're taking security seriously. I doubt it will really change much about the companies' approach to security fixes.
Of course, that's the technical end of things. I don't approve of the social message that sends out. I don't like the trend that the industry is taking with regard to openness and accountability. It goes back to the thing about how the quality of something goes up when it's being developed under public scrutiny (why I love Debian so much!).
Slashdot Mirror
noah
Nope. woody is the first Debian version ever to be labelled "testing". Before this a distribution (say potato or slink) would go straight from unstable to frozen, then along to testing. Please see the announcement on debian-devel-announce. Note that it's dated from mid December of last year. That was the first time there ever was a Debian "testing distribution".
Problems in testing are usually found immediately, and patches released - upgrading involves ONE command as root - Compare that to the fiasco that was Redhat 6.0
Nope. The progression of packages from unstable to testing is defined, and does not allow packages to be updated immediately. Packages must be in sid for 2 weeks with no updates and no release-critical bugs submitted against it. This has the side effect, of course, that if a bug is found in woody, it won't be fixed until the fix can propogate from sid to woody.
Consider the recent thread on debian-devel regarding xfree86-common and a bug that completely broke X in woody. This bug made it through the checks, and, despite being submitted to the BTS several times, still made it through into woody.
BTW, I am a Debian developer and member of the Debian security team. We do not release security updates for woody. Period.
noah
If you're really good about keeping up with bugtraq and friends, then maybe, but you're on your own.
noah
Woody has always been testing. sid is unstable. Simply because woody is labelled 'testing', though, doesn't mean it's some kind of beta release or release candidate or anything else.
The 'testing' branch is a new thing with Debian, created in part to address the fact that Debian's freeze cycle is often so long that many of the included packages are outdated by the time it's released. The idea is that 'unstable' will filter out the critical bugs, and only reasonably high quality packages will get moved to testing (this happens automatically). Then, when it comes time to prepare an actual release, parts of woody can be frozen incrementally. Right now, for example, the base system is frozen. No new features can be added to it, only bugfixes. But the rest of the system is still undergoing development.
Woody has definitely not always been stable by any means. Recently, for example, X completely broke. Though the fix was simple, the problem was not obvious.
Another problem with using woody is that it is not supported by the security team!!! This means that security fixes are not a priority and don't necessarily make it into the distribution any faster than any other updated package. Using woody in a mission critical server environment would be bad. I use woody on a workstation, though, and have found it to be of pretty good quality. It's rare that something that I expect to work doesn't actually work. But then again, I can say the same thing for sid.
noah
Hmm. FreeBSD is slower than Debian? I don't think so. What has FreeBSD released in the last 12 months? 4.2, 4.3, and 4.4. What has Debian released in the last 12 months? Nothing.
Granted, the FreeBSD releases are relatively minor, but at least it's something. Nothing frustrates me more than Debian's current release cycle. Don't get me wrong, I love the project and am an active Debian developer, but we never release new versions.
noah
I don't think that's a good way to look at it. The problem is that the US is not an innocent victim in this situation. The terrorist attack on the US was not the beginning of a new war, but rather a battle in a war that's been going on for years. Try imagining how the people living in the middle east (especially the Arabian countries) view the USA's ongoing involvement in their affairs. It't not too hard to envision them percieving our presence there as a violation of their soverignty.
I believe that protesting further US involvement in the middle east is a wise choice. The US certainly did not appreciate foreign military powers deploying their forces within striking distance of our shores in the past.
(Recall the Cuban Missile Crisis, which occurred when the USSR placed missiles 90 miles from US soil. The US had had missiles nearer than that to Soviet soil, yet nearly started world war 3 when the Soviets placed missiles near our borders.)
I believe that rather than pursue the oxymoronic act of fighting for peace, the US should extend to nations in the middle east the same respect we expect of them: The respect for their sovereignty. Violence will only lead to further violence.
noah
I can't believe I missed it... I know so many others who would love to have been there, too.
noah
It's not the 12 year old that picking the fights. This analogy started with a good one: Microsoft is an essentially invinsible bully roaming the playground beating up on the kids. The kids have no choice whether or not to fight him. That's not called competition. Situations such as this necessitate the intervention of somebody who can enforce some kind of order over the group and stop the bully from causing trouble.
BTW. Even if MS got broken up, linux sure as hell wouldn't take it's place.
Where in this thread has anybody claimed that it would? You're just trolling at this point. There have been several very technically advanced and well engineered operating systems that have failed miserably due to Microsoft's overwhelming control over the market. BeOS, for example, would have been one exciting system to work in, but nobody bought it. The hardware vendors wouldn't write drivers for it because nobody used it (so, therefore, nobody uses it). Nobody wrote commercial apps for it, since nobody used it, meaning that nobody would use it since they couldn't get commercial apps for it.
Microsoft, as the maker of the most popular browser and productivity suite, has the power to dictate what operating systems will succeed in the commercial market today. By keeping Office's file formats propriatary, they are able to ensure that the only people that can reliably read or write Office documents are people using an officially sanctioned MS operating system.
noah
I once saw a user on a lab machine whose prompt wasn -[ date]
this-user-left-herself-logged-in-to-[machine]-o
The sad sad sad thing was that I saw the same user a couple months later and they had not changed their prompt. She was a computer science grad student.
noah
If you claim that spam doesn't cost anything, then why aren't you paying for the bandwidth usage yourself?
A couple months ago my ISP unleashed a huge new mail server cluster (biggest mail server cluster I've ever seen, with vast amounts of disk space and processing power). Within just a couple weeks the system ground almost to a halt under the load of a massive spam campaign. That constituted a DoS attack by any definition. If the spam campaign was big enough to take down that monster server farm, then who knows how many smaller mail systems go down daily as a result of similar attacks.
To those who argue that spam is legitimate and doesn't cost anything, try using your own servers and valid email addresses. Maybe then your claims will have some weight.
noah
"within the law"?!?! You, who claim to not trust the government with your money, trust the government to make your laws? Have you looked at the recent trend in laws passed by the government? Copyright law, UCITA, DMCA, etc? Guess what those laws are doing. Giving MORE FREEDOM TO CORPORATIONS. And you can bet that corporations are going to take whatever they can get. Hell, they're the ones lobbying for such laws. Do you really think some senator dreamed up the DMCA?
Do not fear the government. It is merely a pawn of those with money (the corporations). Money is power.
noah
But are the problems you had problems with the actual packages, with the archives themselves, or really with apt-get? I suspect it's more likely that the problems were related to Corel's archive. Perhaps they provided e.g. a version of libc that apt-get interpreted as being "newer". It's not apt-gets fault, it's that Corel didn't intend to make it easy for *Debian* users to get the package, they intended to make it easy for *Corel Linux* users to get the packages.
There are several lists available of unofficial apt sources. apt-get is designed to easily handle many sources, related or not. That doesn't mean it's immune to screwed up archives.
noah
main(){for(;;) new long double(1);}
This code will cause Windows2000 to use up all available physical/virtual memory, but it won't crash it. It will eventually mess up the current windows session, but to correct it all I have to do is log out and log in again. Linux will crash dead under this program.
Hmm...I think you've been missing out on something all these years. I think you're talking about Minix, when most of the rest of us here are talking about Linux.
What I mean to say is that no, this code will most definitely not crash Linux. In fact, you make me think that Linux probably handles it better than Win2k. I just ran the code on a 120 MHz machine with 16 megs of RAM, and I didn't even need to log out in order to "fix" things. In fact, just for fun I tried running two simultaneous copies of that program...still no problem.
Consider yourself educated. You're welcome.
noah
If your product implements a secure remote login capability, then yes, you could get sued. Actually, the way trademark law seem to apply to computers, if your product is at all related to computers you could probably get sued (and lose). Otherwise it's fine. That's why Microsoft isn't about to sue Ford for the "Explorer" or Netscape sue Lincoln for the "Navigator".
I must be living in the dark but until recently I though SSH was ONLY a protocol. There is a company called SSH, that is news to me.
I guess you've been living in the dark then. Check out www.ssh.com and their commercial SSH product.
noah
* Kleenex - for a facial tissue
* Saran Wrap - for cellophane
* Roller Blade- for inline roller skates
* UNIX - for any OS that looks like the work done by AT&T/Bell Labs
Sure, that's fine, and nobody's going to complain if you use the term ssh generically in conversation, as with each of the examples you listed. However, if an independant product was created whose name was clearly derived from "Kleenex", that would be a trademark violation. The same holds true for SSH.
However, SSH wasn't trademarked originally, and even once it was it was never defended. Until now. But by not defending it from the outset, the trademark holder loses the ability to make future claims.
Imagine John Postel deciding, well after SMTP had acheived widespread acceptance, to trademark the term. Then a couple years later he decides to make claims of violations against all the SMTP-talking mail servers out there. (I know John Postel is dead...I couldn't come up with a better example off hand)
noah
You've got me worried already...
* Display backend : controls the hardware
That's the X server
* GUI library : Basically xlib
Huh? Xlib doesn't povide any GUI stuff at all, unless you consider things like rectangles, points, and arcs to be GUI objects. There are no widgets in Xlib; it is not a GUI library. GTK+ and Qt are GUI libraries.
* User Interface Management : controls for the various devices like mice and keyboards
xset and xmodmap
* GUI backend + library communiction : the glue that would tie everything together and allow them to talk, whether it be by network or any other method
Try X protocol. The thing is, X protocol *must* be on a lower level than widgets or other UI components. If it was up to the higher level stuff, then things like KDE and GNOME simply could not co-exist unless they worked out a new standard for network display. But they've already got a standard in X protocol.
A small question now: does X allow you to make a multi-docment interface (1 big app window, with several document windows that are constrained to within the window). I've been wondering about that for a while. I've seen nothing to say it can, but I still wonder.
Yes, you can "swallow" objects. I don't know if it still does it, but StarOffice used to essentially embed MWM within a window, so you had what ammounted to a StarOffice workspace in which you could iconify, maximize, re-organize, whatever the sub windows. Basically (though I've never actually written code to do it) I believe you just create an MWM widget that is a child of some other manager widget. Afterstep does something similar with whole programs with its "wharf" module. It can be done...Somebody else will probably give you better info on this.
noah
Sorry, this is just about the most annoying thing about X for most end-users, and there is always somebody who jumps up trying to defend it. I don't want every program to use a different widget set. I do want my programs to be able to support basic cut-and-paste. I want good support for scalable fonts.
What is X? It's not a GUI. It was not designed to be a GUI. With that in mind, why on earth should it impose GUI standards? It shouldn't! Now, pick a GUI. Use GNOME for example. It uses the same widget set, can cut&paste between widgets, etc etc. Same is true for KDE. It could be argued that there's no real need for interoperability between those GUIs. Just because they're both based on the same low-level framework doesn't mean they need to do the same things with it. Still, though, even with the many different GUIs available for X, copy&paste works quite well. Lots of effort has been put in to making such things work.
Re: extensions for 3D, anti-aliased text, etc.
Having a general extension mechanism is a good thing. Needing to use it to provide basic functionality isn't such a good thing.
You've got to remember when X was designed. In the 80's, while anti-aliasing did exist, computers really didn't have the processing power to use it comfortably. Same holds true for 3D animation. Can you think of any other GUI frameworks from that era that are still in use? The fact that X, a framework made with no support at all for the "basic functionality" of anti-aliased fonts and 3D animation, can be made to take advantage of new technologies simply by providing an appropriate plugin is really quite amazing.
Having said all that, though, I really do want to see good things from Berlin. I would like to see a more modern framework in use. There's a lot of ancient legacy stuff in X that just isn't used anymore, and unfortunately there's no way to "unplug" such functionality similar to the way you can plug in new functionality.
noah
Check out http://cricket.sourceforge.net/
noah
Why 0.1? Why not 0.0000000001? Version numbering is completely arbitrary. Just ask RMS or whoever decided that Emacs would skip about 10 whole versions several years back. And then look at Debian's apt-get tool, which is very solid and robust, and it's only on version 0.3.19 or something. It's meaningless.
noah
KDE and Qt can *never* be forced back to non-free. They're both GPLed. There's no way to undo that. If they tried integrating non-GPL code with Qt/KDE, they'd be violating the GPL. Therefore they have no choice but to release their code under the GPL.
noah
I don't know where in my post you find any reference to debuggers that hold your hand or some kind of context sensitive help system or whatever. I sure never mentioned that. I'm just saying that Mel was a bad programmer because his code was unnecessarily obfuscated and completely inflexible. It has nothing to do with what tools he did or did not use. Obfuscated, inflexible code can be written with the latest GUI IDE. It doesn't take an old timer with a hex editor, and any hack value it has is quickly lost when you're the one tasked with figuring out why the code won't work after upgrading the system.
noah
noah
There's no reason for outrage because the BSDL allows this! If they author of the code didn't want to allow re-licensing then they wouldn't have chosen the BSD license in the first place. The only thing required by the BSD license is that credit be given. You're free to re-license it under the GPL or some proprietary license or whatever license you can cook up.
The GPL on the other hand, does not allow this. That's explicit. That's one reason why some people choose the GPL: it guarantees that their code will always be free.
Hope that clears things up.
noah
I think this is more of a publicity thing. Over the past year or so there have been some pretty high-profile security problems that have made the software industry look pretty bad ('oh my, the mighty Microsoft got "hacked"'). I think they're just doing this so the general public thinks that they're taking security seriously. I doubt it will really change much about the companies' approach to security fixes.
Of course, that's the technical end of things. I don't approve of the social message that sends out. I don't like the trend that the industry is taking with regard to openness and accountability. It goes back to the thing about how the quality of something goes up when it's being developed under public scrutiny (why I love Debian so much!).
noah