1) Hashing doesn't work for every application (digest authentication for one example)
2) There isn't a way to verify how passwords are being stored on the "other end". The fact that this practice _should_ be used doesn't mean that it _is_, or that there's any way to tell. How do you know that some admin isn't just sitting there reading passwords from their website to try to use them on other websites?
"pay their ridiculous prices just because it's close and convenient."
What do you mean by "rediculous prices"? Those are usually just the prices that you have to charge when you are not screwing someone over. It seems that your greed may be driving corporate greed.
"My favorite places to shop are small online merchants."
Many of these are great. However, because of the anonymity of the web, it is not possible to verify that these people are not themselves screwing someone else over to make their money.
I may be wrong, but I don't think the original X11 was EVER closed source until just recently. XFree86 was a fork of the original X11 for x86 machines, and then after X11 closed it's source XFree86 kept on as a fork of the free X11, and then when XFree86 changed its license X.org took over the free development.
So, as far as I know, all free X implementations are just a fork of the original.
"Not so, it only shows that open source is an effective model IF these transitions occur smoothly and the destination is found to be worthy the journey."
Not really. The fact is that ALL of the choices available for proprietary software are STILL there in open-source. It's just that you also have MORE choices. So, even if this choice is not good in this situation, all of the other choices still exist.
However, I am sure that the transition will be smooth. Why? BECAUSE NOTHING HAS CHANGED YET. Because of open-source, switching vendors does not mean that you have to change even a single line of code in your system. With the proprietary model, switching vendors means completely wrecking existing infrastructure. In those cases, your questions are valid. In this case, switching to X.org isn't really changing anything yet, just switching vendors.
Not really. They are usually just smaller and local. That's the real reason behind the "buy local" idea. It's not necessarily that paying money to someone to your home town is better than paying someone in Oregon or wherever, it's that if they live in your town, then your own community holds them to higher standards.
This is BS. There are many responsible companies. Unfortunately they usually don't become big because being responsible usually means that they have to have higher prices. And, of course, most computer purchasers care more about price than responsible companies.
I think there's a difference between trying to destroy microsoft and trying to get people to understand that there _is_ life outside of Microsoft. Microsoft is like an addiction to alcohol. Alcohol isn't evil, it's the addiction.
I remember when I worked tech support for an ISP in 95-96. Internet explorer's error messages would ALWAYS BLAME THE ISP for any problems. For example, if you forgot to dial your internet connection, but tried to use IE to connect to your website, IE would give an error message saying that there was a problem with your ISP that was causing the problem. We'd get calls every day from people whose only problem is that they didn't dial in. Why didn't they check their connection? IE told them it was our fault.
"I suspect that to make Java truly viable on the desktop it would be necessary to have true VM sharing."
I doubt that's the real problem. I think the bigger problem is just the super-object nature of it causes things to be large, especially since "everything is an object".
Actually, the problem with X is that people just don't know how to run it. Most distros run it with a normal priority. This is idiocy for a desktop system (granted, many distros aren't geared for the desktop). This works great for a server, where you would rather Apache serve a request fast than to get a nice screen refresh.
If you bump up the priority of X, the panel, and your window manager to something like -20, you will find that X responsiveness increases tremendously.
This is exactly what the other OS's do to get their responsiveness (that, and I _think_ they mlock parts of the application and explorer into memory).
Re:The hell? Linux isn't different at all
on
Ten Years of BeOS
·
· Score: 1
"So instead of buying applications, they have to download and/or compile them"
We have these great things these days - they're called "distributions". You should try one.
" If Linux is going to surpass windows on the desktop, compiling stuff is not an option. "
Who compiles these days anyway?
"is something the end user absolutely positively doesn't need to know anything about."
Correct. And there is no reason they need to these days on Linux.
"You can't harbour both attitudes"
Actually you can. This IS the strength of Linux. Those with the ability can do cutting-edge stuff using source code, and those without the ability can just wait for it to stabilize and be available as a binary install for their platform.
This is the way it works for all systems, it's just that the development phase is available for more people than it is for proprietary software. If you don't want to participate in it, DON'T, and wait for more stable releases.
Why is choice such a difficult thing for people to grasp? If your options expand, but you don't like the new ones, DON'T CHOOSE THEM.
By the way, this is the reason why MicroSoft historically has not done dividend payments. They can prop up the stock more by keeping the money and having the stock price go up rather than distributing the money to shareholders where it will have to be taxed.
Actually, I don't believe corporations pay taxes on profits. They pay taxes on employees (also use taxes and property taxes) and the shareholders pay taxes on dividends. I could be wrong but I think that's how it works out.
"You cant copy/paste (and by extension drag and drop) files, bitmaps, etc uniformly between apps."
It's true that there are apps that don't do drag-and-drop well, but that's true on Windows, too. It has nothing to do with X per se, but with the applications you are using.
"Besides the nuisance of what mouse click or keystroke you use to move text, it's not a clipboard like Windows uses, merely a text buffer."
Wrong. It even has content negotiation which allows applications to request the selection in different formats depending on what it can handle.
"It's just another item in a laundry list of issues that are major to end users"
I agree that more applications need to support drag-and-drop and better clipboard integration, but let's not put the blame on X when it supports that just fine.
I know of many. The whole idea of "installing" software means that you are really changing the way your OS behaves, especially with integrated tools that are all the rage today. MacOS isn't as bad with integrated things (especially with their separation of extensions and applications, and their "bundles" idea), however, the MacOS/9 and/X living together has caused many people I know to reinstall several times to get it to run right.
"Computers can be easy to use, people should certainly never need to build a computer from scratch, or reinstall their OS beyond putting a CD in the drive and turning the machine on"
You miss the point. For a PC to be a consumer device, the user should NEVER have to reinstall their OS, PERIOD. In fact, the concept of installing is completely foreign to the idea of a consumer device.
For a PC to be a consumable device, they would have to build it like a game console:
1) Have a cartridge/DVD system 2) When a cartridge/DVD is not in the drive, it runs a small file manager which can't do much 3) When you put your cartridge in the drive, that program takes over the whole computer.
"So what if it breaks now and then?"
Again, we're talking about a consumer device. Breaking is not something a consumer device should do. How many times have you had to re-install the operating system in your DVD player?
I think the issue you're having with the parent poster is that you don't understand what classifies something as being a consumer device. Computers certainly aren't consumer devices.
Low-level programming
on
Hardcore Java
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
SHAMELESS PLUG -
For those of you wanting to learn something a little more hardcore than Java, check out the book in my sig. Joel Spolsky from JoelOnSoftware.com has a review of it in the link below.
"However, the expenses of the stock plan were never booked."
If they were stock options, that would actually be pretty normal. For some reason it has taken decades to convince wall street that options really were an expense. Warren Buffet gave an excellent piece on this in one of his letters to shareholders, but I can't find the link.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. In fact, that's one of the things that motivated me to write my book (see my sig). That, and the fact that TAOCP needed a prequel.
Two things:
1) Hashing doesn't work for every application (digest authentication for one example)
2) There isn't a way to verify how passwords are being stored on the "other end". The fact that this practice _should_ be used doesn't mean that it _is_, or that there's any way to tell. How do you know that some admin isn't just sitting there reading passwords from their website to try to use them on other websites?
"pay their ridiculous prices just because it's close and convenient."
What do you mean by "rediculous prices"? Those are usually just the prices that you have to charge when you are not screwing someone over. It seems that your greed may be driving corporate greed.
"My favorite places to shop are small online merchants."
Many of these are great. However, because of the anonymity of the web, it is not possible to verify that these people are not themselves screwing someone else over to make their money.
He said GPL-friendly, not GPL.
I may be wrong, but I don't think the original X11 was EVER closed source until just recently. XFree86 was a fork of the original X11 for x86 machines, and then after X11 closed it's source XFree86 kept on as a fork of the free X11, and then when XFree86 changed its license X.org took over the free development.
So, as far as I know, all free X implementations are just a fork of the original.
"Not so, it only shows that open source is an effective model IF these transitions occur smoothly and the destination is found to be worthy the journey."
Not really. The fact is that ALL of the choices available for proprietary software are STILL there in open-source. It's just that you also have MORE choices. So, even if this choice is not good in this situation, all of the other choices still exist.
However, I am sure that the transition will be smooth. Why? BECAUSE NOTHING HAS CHANGED YET. Because of open-source, switching vendors does not mean that you have to change even a single line of code in your system. With the proprietary model, switching vendors means completely wrecking existing infrastructure. In those cases, your questions are valid. In this case, switching to X.org isn't really changing anything yet, just switching vendors.
"so in the end they just go belly-up"
Not really. They are usually just smaller and local. That's the real reason behind the "buy local" idea. It's not necessarily that paying money to someone to your home town is better than paying someone in Oregon or wherever, it's that if they live in your town, then your own community holds them to higher standards.
This is BS. There are many responsible companies. Unfortunately they usually don't become big because being responsible usually means that they have to have higher prices. And, of course, most computer purchasers care more about price than responsible companies.
I think there's a difference between trying to destroy microsoft and trying to get people to understand that there _is_ life outside of Microsoft. Microsoft is like an addiction to alcohol. Alcohol isn't evil, it's the addiction.
I remember when I worked tech support for an ISP in 95-96. Internet explorer's error messages would ALWAYS BLAME THE ISP for any problems. For example, if you forgot to dial your internet connection, but tried to use IE to connect to your website, IE would give an error message saying that there was a problem with your ISP that was causing the problem. We'd get calls every day from people whose only problem is that they didn't dial in. Why didn't they check their connection? IE told them it was our fault.
"I suspect that to make Java truly viable on the desktop it would be necessary to have true VM sharing."
I doubt that's the real problem. I think the bigger problem is just the super-object nature of it causes things to be large, especially since "everything is an object".
Actually, the problem with X is that people just don't know how to run it. Most distros run it with a normal priority. This is idiocy for a desktop system (granted, many distros aren't geared for the desktop). This works great for a server, where you would rather Apache serve a request fast than to get a nice screen refresh.
If you bump up the priority of X, the panel, and your window manager to something like -20, you will find that X responsiveness increases tremendously.
This is exactly what the other OS's do to get their responsiveness (that, and I _think_ they mlock parts of the application and explorer into memory).
"So instead of buying applications, they have to download and/or compile them"
We have these great things these days - they're called "distributions". You should try one.
" If Linux is going to surpass windows on the desktop, compiling stuff is not an option. "
Who compiles these days anyway?
"is something the end user absolutely positively doesn't need to know anything about."
Correct. And there is no reason they need to these days on Linux.
"You can't harbour both attitudes"
Actually you can. This IS the strength of Linux. Those with the ability can do cutting-edge stuff using source code, and those without the ability can just wait for it to stabilize and be available as a binary install for their platform.
This is the way it works for all systems, it's just that the development phase is available for more people than it is for proprietary software. If you don't want to participate in it, DON'T, and wait for more stable releases.
Why is choice such a difficult thing for people to grasp? If your options expand, but you don't like the new ones, DON'T CHOOSE THEM.
" Users don't have to edit the registry to change anything. It's all reflected in a graphical interface."
Hahahahahahahahaha!
You have _used_ Windows, right?
How do you remove processes from being run at bootup, then? That's right, the registry, because there isn't an interface to do that.
By the way, this is the reason why MicroSoft historically has not done dividend payments. They can prop up the stock more by keeping the money and having the stock price go up rather than distributing the money to shareholders where it will have to be taxed.
Actually, I don't believe corporations pay taxes on profits. They pay taxes on employees (also use taxes and property taxes) and the shareholders pay taxes on dividends. I could be wrong but I think that's how it works out.
"Pine has ctrl-k and ctrl-u for cut and paste lines--no highlighting, since I access it through telnet."
Ummmm... you can do highlighting AND copy/past on telnet sessions, too. I'm not sure what's stopping you.
"I don't really care what system gets used...It's slightly annoying, however, to have to use different methods all the time."
This is true. We need to all file bug reports on the applications which break copy/paste.
"You cant copy/paste (and by extension drag and drop) files, bitmaps, etc uniformly between apps."
It's true that there are apps that don't do drag-and-drop well, but that's true on Windows, too. It has nothing to do with X per se, but with the applications you are using.
"Besides the nuisance of what mouse click or keystroke you use to move text, it's not a clipboard like Windows uses, merely a text buffer."
Wrong. It even has content negotiation which allows applications to request the selection in different formats depending on what it can handle.
"It's just another item in a laundry list of issues that are major to end users"
I agree that more applications need to support drag-and-drop and better clipboard integration, but let's not put the blame on X when it supports that just fine.
I actually use highlight+middle click combination quite a bit.
I know of many. The whole idea of "installing" software means that you are really changing the way your OS behaves, especially with integrated tools that are all the rage today. MacOS isn't as bad with integrated things (especially with their separation of extensions and applications, and their "bundles" idea), however, the MacOS/9 and /X living together has caused many people I know to reinstall several times to get it to run right.
The JVM really isn't that slow. AWT is slow and gave java a REALLY bad name.
Also, Java startup on *NIX system is slow because it goes through about 5 different shell scripts before startup.
"Computers can be easy to use, people should certainly never need to build a computer from scratch, or reinstall their OS beyond putting a CD in the drive and turning the machine on"
You miss the point. For a PC to be a consumer device, the user should NEVER have to reinstall their OS, PERIOD. In fact, the concept of installing is completely foreign to the idea of a consumer device.
For a PC to be a consumable device, they would have to build it like a game console:
1) Have a cartridge/DVD system
2) When a cartridge/DVD is not in the drive, it runs a small file manager which can't do much
3) When you put your cartridge in the drive, that program takes over the whole computer.
"So what if it breaks now and then?"
Again, we're talking about a consumer device. Breaking is not something a consumer device should do. How many times have you had to re-install the operating system in your DVD player?
I think the issue you're having with the parent poster is that you don't understand what classifies something as being a consumer device. Computers certainly aren't consumer devices.
SHAMELESS PLUG -
For those of you wanting to learn something a little more hardcore than Java, check out the book in my sig. Joel Spolsky from JoelOnSoftware.com has a review of it in the link below.
"However, the expenses of the stock plan were never booked."
If they were stock options, that would actually be pretty normal. For some reason it has taken decades to convince wall street that options really were an expense. Warren Buffet gave an excellent piece on this in one of his letters to shareholders, but I can't find the link.