It's curious that the number of big BSD-licensed software (and I'll attach the "BSD-like in spirit" licenses like the Apache license to the bunch) owned by big successful companies is disproportionally small. The OSes (Free|Net|Open)BSD, PostgreSQL and Apache are examples of successful software that's not being supported by a single company - they're practically totally consumer-supported. The only counter-example I know of is PHP, but despite that it's more widespread than both MySQL and PostgreSQL together (and probably as wide-spread as Apache), it's rarely a buzzword of the day. (of course, then there are Microsoft's open source projects released under BSDL but that's a completely different thing).
It looks like while GPLed software can be viral and dangerous to other companies, this very property protects GPL software in a way that's beneficial to the company that developed it. A BigCompany can't realistically fork a GPL software and make it into a separate product, but it doesn't need to when it can simply buy the company that developed it.
Has anyone actually tried the new Sirverlight-enabled site? It's awful.
The design is bad, but that's just personal tastes.
The site isn't resolution-independent - you can't even change the font size (or actually, you can, so some text and labels get changed and the rest of the UI - probably the "dynamic" part, remains the same).
It's slow to load - the first time I got to it, it did about a dozen round-trips to the server, presumably to fetch various "dynamic" objects before even displaying the page. During this I could either look at the blank page or at the browser's status bar blinking "Waiting for server... Done... Waiting for server... Done... Waiting for server... etc."
It doesn't add absolutely anything to the plain-HTML approach, except few flash-like animations (which are ugly as only Microsoft's attempts at design can be). Even the search is not "ajaxy" - submitting the search form does a whole-page reload. Isn't the new technology supposed to make everything more dynamic and avoid such things?
In short, this completely looks like a web site that uses too much Flash and in the wrong way.
What's the problem here? Ginormous megamarts (wal-mart, etc.) can cope with miles of bills printed every day - I'd say this particular technology is well understood and implemented.
Are the GUI designers taking a nap while the programmers work? What's with all the empty space and huge nonessential widgets? Every single window in the screenshot (except maybe Konquerer) needs heavy redesigning:
System monitor: Huge tabs, huge menu Compare it to Windows's Task manager or OSX Activity monitor - they pack much more data in a more readable way.
Kopete: That toolbar is enormous! And the status bar at the bottom of the window looks mostly useless. The icons inside it are not only badly distributed spatially and of uneven / visually unadjusted size, they are also ugly and uninformative. The whole window looks like it's been designed by a novice VB programmer in a hurry.
That window in the background: It looks like it's some sort of configuration application, and from what I see, the "main thing" in the application, probably the reasin the application exists, takes only about *half* of the window space. I'm talking about the list of effects. The rest of the window is taken by the menu, probably some kind of toolbar, probably a search bar, some kind of help label, tabs, a "hint", and a space at the bottom of the window which probably contains "ok/cancel/reset" buttons.
I'm not saying that all window elements should be close together - I appreciate the aesthetic space around the widgets, but this particular UI on this particular screenshot is heavily underdesigned.
Actually, it seems to be an biological evolutionary trait. We are constantly interested in what do other members of our species around us do, whether we like it or not. The reasons is that there's better chance of survival if mistakes are learned from others. The "media" are just catering to this instinct - if people want to do something, someone will figure out how to make money from it sooner or later. Incidentally, this same instinct is why we like reading stories (and watching movies), whether fiction or not. In fact, it looks like the more intelligent members of the species like their stories to be as fictional as possible, maybe because they have already learned whatever is there to learn about the mundane, and maybe this kind of learning has the purpose of preparing one for the unexpected.
It would be nice to switch that circuit off, but it seems like it will be stuck with us for a long time.
You know those spectacular space battles you've been watching on TV all the time? Well now you know what happens when an Imperial huge-mega-ultra-destroyer-obliterator fires... and misses. Some poor planet thousands of light years away gets powdered to dust. We're lucky that was a shot from a tiny-wee-shuttle, from thousands of years away these cause just a 5 ms blip.
Consider these two problems in the approach you proposed:
Size / space / efficiency - your VM needs to either implement the *entire* API the plugin application uses, or it has to do realtime translation of the API to the higher, "OS"-level API. The first approch makes the VM huge, the second one introduces another layer that might have security vulnerabilities (in this case it's normal to assume that *no* code beyond the "hello, world" application is bug-free).
What does the application / plugin you described *do*? If it's a simple Flash animation, it's sufficient to have it access only the GUI parts of the API. If it's a network-aware application it needs more-or-less full access to network API (meaning at least TCP/IP sockets), if it's more complex, for example, requiring authorization, it needs access to OS's authorization mechanisms, if it needs to read personal data about the user, it may need to access local files. You need a sandbox that allows users to be productive, which usually means applications need to interact with the system and other applications, and the number of interactions soon explodes, which leads all the way back to the original problem.
Sandboxes like Java seem good in theory, but applications feel feeble and powerless when constraint. For example, Java implemented its own GUI, so it didn't rely at all on the underlying OS's GUI except for primitives like "draw line" and "get cursor click event", but its GUI was (and mostly still is) ugly. Users now expect that they can copy a graph in Excel and paste it into the Java applet in the browser, and complain when it doesn't work. (And I'm on the side of the users on this one: it's year 2007 now, we should be able to handle this copy-paste thing by now.
The problem is that, like a computer with its Ethernet cable unplugged, an application completely isolated from everything else is useless. For example: at the very least you need to allow an embeddable object (like a Java applet, ActiveX, etc.) to draw itself on screen. To do that you need to enable it to do a large number of GUI-oriented calls. What happens if one of these calls is found to be exploitable by a malicious process? It would be like you did nothing at all for security.
Todays software has *so many* interdependencies that it's practically impossible to segregate everything into neat little boxes whose security can be managed individually. For example, a modern Windows application can (and often does) interact with a large number of subsystems that have been, and still are, found fallible, which fall into these broad categories:
Win32 API, meaning KERNEL32, USER32, GDI32 and others
OLE2/ActiveX API, connecting its tendrils (i.e. users can embed their own executable code!) throughout the desktop environment (shell, Windows Explorer) and subsystems like database management, logging, etc.
.Net API, which uses the above two APIs
The obvious "solution" is: blame Microsoft - it's bad design practice to enable so many possible interactions throughout the system. But this would mean that users won't be able to use such nifty things like "live" copy & paste throughout their applications (OLE), Explorer shell extensions (like WinZip), unified database drivers (ODBC, OLE, ADO), etc. -- and all of these things are selling points (AND, unsurprisingly, these are some of the more important things users miss when they try to use Linux). If you try to do it partially, for example disable OLE calls from ActiveX controls, business users will be angry because their embedded ActiveX applications will stop working.
And if you DO try to lock everything down, you'll get hordes of angry users complaining about needing to click "Allow" every time they move the mouse pointer:)
There's a lot (and I mean lot - nowadays it's hard to find something that's not so) various network-aware equipment that runs Linux and other (L)GPL software without mentioning the fact. Anyone who's been looking at a lot of various VoIP and NAS appliances (especially the cheaper ones) can testify to this. Who cares? Who should care? Linus himself? The users certainly won't.
I don't know you or the guy but I did spend a few hours on the Galaxyzoo sorting galaxies (pretty pictures and all that) and I did notice the same thing. I was thinking "is it me or there really is a preferred direction of the spin?" since before that (actually, before this/. article) I thought the direction of the spin should be random.
I'm saying that the statements this guy makes are directly verifiable - anyone who wants to can look at the pictures and conclude the same. Except if there's some unobvious error (such as Galaxyzoo's server having a bias for spin directions), his observation is correct and it shouldn't matter that he doesn't have a reputation yet - the important thing is that he's not wrong.
For example: number of lines of anything business-related (e.g. not Usenet or Slashdot postings) written times the weight of objects lifted (e.g. server cases, CRT monitors, keyboards, UTP cables, etc.) times the distance these objects were carried. Units of measure are left for the user to define:)
And then call it something smart, like "The Q sysadmin load factor":)
If they're running Windows connected to the Internet, you should be throughly and significantly fucked. But it's not like all your beer in the fridge will suddenly turn to poison or that you're going to starve. Call me a luddite but I stick by my story:)
Err no its not. Thats like wiping out every social security number, watching the social safety net system collapse, and saying "SEE SOCIAL SAFETY DOESNT WORK AND IS WRONG." Or beating up your mailman, not getting mail, and saying "SEE, THE POSTAL SERVICE OUT HERE SUCKS."
Until the SkyNet rises or we end up in the Matrix, they're "just computers", not really essential for life. It's not like Microsoft can't just set up a new validation server whose most important line of code is "return TRUE;".
A friend of mine was immediately reminded of the Fight Club movie - how they tried to blow up all the banks at the end so nobody would owe anybody anything. Imagine if some digital vigilante wiped out Microsoft's database of keys, maybe like an inside job... all installs everywhere would simply be invalidated in an instant:) Now *that* would be a strong and immediate demonstration of both how the whole "activation" thing and DRM are wrong.
I think a much more interesting question is: why is its path (tail) curved? Is it an artifact of imaging, Earth spin, a black hole in the center of the curvature?
This makes it very attractive to most open source developers (my cousin being a very active member of the community).
And yet, in these times where awareness of open source is pretty high, it's the one ubiquitous piece of software that everyone uses daily that's essentially a proprietary black box. Ok, the situation on Linux is not so bad because of binaries Adobe provides, but it's still a binary blob, and some other operating systems (admittedly, with a very low market share) are left behind.
Like games, Flash is a multimedia thing and for most non-technical users one of the essential parts of their daily experience of computers. There's not much chance for an all-open desktop system while games and multimedia players are left proprietary.
Nobody even comes close to intel's infrastructure services. That is why even when other vendors have had superior processors for periods of time over the years
And what about Itanium? It's Intel's, it's been pushed down consumer throats, and still it's unpopular.
Not an expert on video streaming so here goes: Why is noone using MPEG-1? Ok, it's somewhat limited in resolution/bandwidth, but if you're not streaming DVD-quality or better, and have a reasonably broadband audience, why not go with MPEG-1? AFAIK it's not patented now, and every video tool I've seen knows how to use it. There are even pure java players out there.
Slashdot Mirror
It's curious that the number of big BSD-licensed software (and I'll attach the "BSD-like in spirit" licenses like the Apache license to the bunch) owned by big successful companies is disproportionally small. The OSes (Free|Net|Open)BSD, PostgreSQL and Apache are examples of successful software that's not being supported by a single company - they're practically totally consumer-supported. The only counter-example I know of is PHP, but despite that it's more widespread than both MySQL and PostgreSQL together (and probably as wide-spread as Apache), it's rarely a buzzword of the day. (of course, then there are Microsoft's open source projects released under BSDL but that's a completely different thing).
It looks like while GPLed software can be viral and dangerous to other companies, this very property protects GPL software in a way that's beneficial to the company that developed it. A BigCompany can't realistically fork a GPL software and make it into a separate product, but it doesn't need to when it can simply buy the company that developed it.
There's an update on the article here: http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/01/oops_look_at_th.html See also http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2008-January/022854.html for discussion on FreeBSD.
Has anyone actually tried the new Sirverlight-enabled site? It's awful.
In short, this completely looks like a web site that uses too much Flash and in the wrong way.
What's the problem here? Ginormous megamarts (wal-mart, etc.) can cope with miles of bills printed every day - I'd say this particular technology is well understood and implemented.
Are the GUI designers taking a nap while the programmers work? What's with all the empty space and huge nonessential widgets? Every single window in the screenshot (except maybe Konquerer) needs heavy redesigning:
- System monitor: Huge tabs, huge menu Compare it to Windows's Task manager or OSX Activity monitor - they pack much more data in a more readable way.
- Kopete: That toolbar is enormous! And the status bar at the bottom of the window looks mostly useless. The icons inside it are not only badly distributed spatially and of uneven / visually unadjusted size, they are also ugly and uninformative. The whole window looks like it's been designed by a novice VB programmer in a hurry.
- That window in the background: It looks like it's some sort of configuration application, and from what I see, the "main thing" in the application, probably the reasin the application exists, takes only about *half* of the window space. I'm talking about the list of effects. The rest of the window is taken by the menu, probably some kind of toolbar, probably a search bar, some kind of help label, tabs, a "hint", and a space at the bottom of the window which probably contains "ok/cancel/reset" buttons.
I'm not saying that all window elements should be close together - I appreciate the aesthetic space around the widgets, but this particular UI on this particular screenshot is heavily underdesigned.Personally, I'm still waiting for "E.T. - The Final Cut", where the walkie-talkies get replaced with plush Teletubby toys!
Do my eyes deceive me or Google just got Slashdotted? :)
In other words: Where's my flying car?!
Actually, it seems to be an biological evolutionary trait. We are constantly interested in what do other members of our species around us do, whether we like it or not. The reasons is that there's better chance of survival if mistakes are learned from others. The "media" are just catering to this instinct - if people want to do something, someone will figure out how to make money from it sooner or later. Incidentally, this same instinct is why we like reading stories (and watching movies), whether fiction or not. In fact, it looks like the more intelligent members of the species like their stories to be as fictional as possible, maybe because they have already learned whatever is there to learn about the mundane, and maybe this kind of learning has the purpose of preparing one for the unexpected.
It would be nice to switch that circuit off, but it seems like it will be stuck with us for a long time.
You know those spectacular space battles you've been watching on TV all the time? Well now you know what happens when an Imperial huge-mega-ultra-destroyer-obliterator fires... and misses. Some poor planet thousands of light years away gets powdered to dust. We're lucky that was a shot from a tiny-wee-shuttle, from thousands of years away these cause just a 5 ms blip.
Consider these two problems in the approach you proposed:
Sandboxes like Java seem good in theory, but applications feel feeble and powerless when constraint. For example, Java implemented its own GUI, so it didn't rely at all on the underlying OS's GUI except for primitives like "draw line" and "get cursor click event", but its GUI was (and mostly still is) ugly. Users now expect that they can copy a graph in Excel and paste it into the Java applet in the browser, and complain when it doesn't work. (And I'm on the side of the users on this one: it's year 2007 now, we should be able to handle this copy-paste thing by now.
The problem is that, like a computer with its Ethernet cable unplugged, an application completely isolated from everything else is useless. For example: at the very least you need to allow an embeddable object (like a Java applet, ActiveX, etc.) to draw itself on screen. To do that you need to enable it to do a large number of GUI-oriented calls. What happens if one of these calls is found to be exploitable by a malicious process? It would be like you did nothing at all for security.
Todays software has *so many* interdependencies that it's practically impossible to segregate everything into neat little boxes whose security can be managed individually. For example, a modern Windows application can (and often does) interact with a large number of subsystems that have been, and still are, found fallible, which fall into these broad categories:
The obvious "solution" is: blame Microsoft - it's bad design practice to enable so many possible interactions throughout the system. But this would mean that users won't be able to use such nifty things like "live" copy & paste throughout their applications (OLE), Explorer shell extensions (like WinZip), unified database drivers (ODBC, OLE, ADO), etc. -- and all of these things are selling points (AND, unsurprisingly, these are some of the more important things users miss when they try to use Linux). If you try to do it partially, for example disable OLE calls from ActiveX controls, business users will be angry because their embedded ActiveX applications will stop working.
And if you DO try to lock everything down, you'll get hordes of angry users complaining about needing to click "Allow" every time they move the mouse pointer :)
There's a lot (and I mean lot - nowadays it's hard to find something that's not so) various network-aware equipment that runs Linux and other (L)GPL software without mentioning the fact. Anyone who's been looking at a lot of various VoIP and NAS appliances (especially the cheaper ones) can testify to this. Who cares? Who should care? Linus himself? The users certainly won't.
I don't know you or the guy but I did spend a few hours on the Galaxyzoo sorting galaxies (pretty pictures and all that) and I did notice the same thing. I was thinking "is it me or there really is a preferred direction of the spin?" since before that (actually, before this /. article) I thought the direction of the spin should be random.
I'm saying that the statements this guy makes are directly verifiable - anyone who wants to can look at the pictures and conclude the same. Except if there's some unobvious error (such as Galaxyzoo's server having a bias for spin directions), his observation is correct and it shouldn't matter that he doesn't have a reputation yet - the important thing is that he's not wrong.
And then call it something smart, like "The Q sysadmin load factor" :)
If they're running Windows connected to the Internet, you should be throughly and significantly fucked. But it's not like all your beer in the fridge will suddenly turn to poison or that you're going to starve. Call me a luddite but I stick by my story :)
Man can dream...
I think a much more interesting question is: why is its path (tail) curved? Is it an artifact of imaging, Earth spin, a black hole in the center of the curvature?
No. Isn't it nice to have well-defined communication protocols now?
It would be like some site banning Firefox (or IE) because they use a slightly different HTTP than the rest.
If you're really want to help, invest time and effort in improving Linux, and stay away from flamewars :)
And yet, in these times where awareness of open source is pretty high, it's the one ubiquitous piece of software that everyone uses daily that's essentially a proprietary black box. Ok, the situation on Linux is not so bad because of binaries Adobe provides, but it's still a binary blob, and some other operating systems (admittedly, with a very low market share) are left behind.
Like games, Flash is a multimedia thing and for most non-technical users one of the essential parts of their daily experience of computers. There's not much chance for an all-open desktop system while games and multimedia players are left proprietary.
Haven't you heard? It's no longer politically correct to call them "users". The lowest applicable designation right now is "geniuses"...
Not an expert on video streaming so here goes: Why is noone using MPEG-1? Ok, it's somewhat limited in resolution/bandwidth, but if you're not streaming DVD-quality or better, and have a reasonably broadband audience, why not go with MPEG-1? AFAIK it's not patented now, and every video tool I've seen knows how to use it. There are even pure java players out there.