If you compile mplayer without the gui, then it doesn't have skins, of course:) All you get is a window with a movie playing inside (or no window at all for fullscreen mode). It has on-screen display (like a vcr), which eliminates the need for a gui anyway, and the developers apparently put in a full-blown shell recently, also overlayed onto the video. I think these features are somewhat alpha-quality, but they should be ready Real Soon Now.
What's the Linux equivalent of a corrupted registry?
A screwed package management database. Although I've never experienced that particular problem, I've heard it can be a real pain to fix, and that it might be easier to reinstall from backup/scratch.
Microsoft vulnerabilities are almost all in the explicitly internet related microsoft tools.
I think if user-level security was as important to Windows as it is to 'nix, you'd see a lot more non-internet-related holes being announced. For example, the shatter attack that lets you gain system priviledges as a normal user on many systems.
Most of the non-network holes on Linux have to do with gaining priviledges and overwriting other users' files, but these issues don't matter much on single-user Windows systems.
Postscript is often generated by Windows when it sends a job to a laser printer.
Given that, the easiest way to make postscript in Windows is probably to add a fake postscript printer (you don't need the physical printer, Windows just needs to think it's there). You'd want to add a high-end color one if you want color.
Then when you want to generate postscript, you print to that printer, but select "print to file", and it will write the postscript to a file.
I think postscript is more popular than PDF for sending jobs to print shops and such. Postscript was around before PDF, and it's used as a native language for many laser printers (PCL is another common printer language). Most vector drawing programs like Corel Draw and Adobe Illustrator can generate postscript, and they can also import it. Many academic papers are distributed in postscript, probably because they were written in TeX.
PDF is used more as a document exchange format. It has almost exactly the same feature-set as postscript, but it's mostly binary, and I think it's supposed to be optimized for viewing on the Web. Postscript is actually a complete programming language that focuses on vector graphics. It's human readable, but most programs produce pretty obfuscated postscript. PDF and gzipped postscript tend to be about the same size.
Postscript doesn't really get developed any more, but PDF is actively developed by Adobe. So PDF gets features added such as hyperlinks, which are especially good for indexes and tables of contents, and encryption (although Adobe's PDF encryption was pathetic last I heard).
If you're interested, Adobe has postscript and PDF pretty well documented on their web site.
Summary: yes there are free PDF tools, but not for Windows.
Ghostscript runs fine on Windows, and it isn't in any way a hack. See here for the latest Ghostscript release. I use a wonky combination of Ghostscript, Acrobat Reader, and a freeware Windows LPD in order to print documents to my Winprinter over the network.
In my limited experience, GS does a better PS->PDF conversion than Distiller. Conversely, Acrobat Reader on Linux seems to do a better job at PDF->PS.
There really aren't many native PDF tools per se, but it is true that many 'nix tools produce postscript, which can be easily converted to PDF. The only free tool I'm aware of that produces PDF natively is pdftex, which is available on Windows as part of the MiKTeX TeX distribution.
You could probably hack something together with Systrace. It's a BSD thing, but it looks like they're porting it to Linux as well. There's also Syscalltrack, but it doesn't look as ready yet, and I think it's aimed at Linux 2.5.x.
I've thought of making something like ZoneAlarm on Linux myself, but felt it was more of a novelty than something useful, since I find my applications pretty trustworthy as it is.
Riiiiight. And the newbies are going to understand how intuitive that command was and kick themselves in the ass for not having thought of it sooner.
It seems pretty intuitive to me.
(defun viper-mode (...)) : define a function named viper-mode that does the following: (while (read-char) (ding)) : while there is keyboard input, read a character, and beep.
That's pretty straight-forward, isn't it? If I wanted Emacs to do nothing but beep every time I pressed a key, I'd probably do something quite similar.
Oh wait. You must have missed the fact that the parent post was a joke. Serves you right for commenting about things you don't understand I guess (waits for flameage).
He said the room's lighting would be flickering at 60 Hz, not the monitor. Then the 60 Hz lighting would presumably interfere with the monitor, causing the beat pattern he described.
And isn't this why most hardware manufacturers don't release Linux drivers? Because "most people" use Windows?
That's a great argument in regards to Debian's ports. Thanks for mentioning it.
I believe that having so many ports in Debian greatly increases software's robustness, since different architectures' peculiarities can point out flaws in a program's logic. At the same time, most software, once it's been ported to a few architectures, will work on any other new architecture with little or no work, so there is a great cost-benefit tradeoff for adding more ports. Stuff like XFree86 can be an exception, since it's so hardware-specific, but the benefits of porting are probably still worth it. Why else would Linux work on 20 different architectures!?
GSView (requires Ghostscript) works pretty well on Windows. It's also free beer/speech, depending on which version you get (old versions get relicensed as GPL when a new version is released). As for editing, I don't know of anything besides acrobat that edits PDF directly.
Or how about that funky key between the Alt and Ctrl on US keyboards? Same freakin' flag, and after all these years it *still* gets in the way.
I mapped it to capslock in X, after mapping my capslock key to escape in order to speed up Vim (You press escape a lot in Vim). And my right windows key is the Compose key, which lets me type characters like ÿ and Æ. Down with useless buttons!
The biggest problem I've seen in the open source world is that the people writing the software write it for themselves.
I don't consider that a problem. That's what makes OSS so good, to me. Obviously it's not so good for people who don't work the way I do. It seems to me that the people expressing my viewpoint are often lambasted as being elitists, but I think that's rarely the case.
I'm not one of those people who wants Linux to stay "1337," by keeping all the current non-users away. Instead, I simply find it irrelevant whether people use it or not. If they do, and it works for them, good. If it doesn't work for them, no loss.
Uncompassionate bastard that I am, I only see secondary benefits to Linux becoming more popular, namely that device and software manufacturers may be more willing to enable their products to be used on Linux. But I distrust non-OSS, and they are unlikely to make their products OSS, so I would probably find that benefit rather limited.
There was no real need to change the IDE code, but some people felt it was a mess and needed to be cleaned up. Unfortunately, it broke badly in the process, so the 2.4 IDE was ported to 2.5, putting things back pretty much as they were. Kernel Traffic is a good source of information about all this stuff. Of course, this is a vast oversimplification, and some of the activity was due to your standard mailing list flame war.
Well, I admit I'm rude, but worse than that, I was talking out of my ass. I haven't even tried any of those programs until a couple hours ago.
However, I installed Konqeror, and it did work out of the box for browsing and viewing files on the network. No initscript whatsoever is installed. All the kde services started themselves when I ran konq. I don't see one called lisa though. This may just be my distro's (Debian) doing.
smb2www also worked well, once I fixed a trivial configuration problem. That's not out-of-the-box, but I filed a bug report, so next week, it will probably work with no user effort.
I tried a couple others (Linneighborhood, komba2, xsmbrowse), and admittedly, they mount shares and make you navigate to a directory rather than letting you access the files immediately.
I apologize for being an ass; however, you made it sound like Linux users had to use smbmount directly to do any kind of browsing, which wasn't the case.
I hate to say this since I'm going to get slammed, but why aren't you guys bitching about all the African American kids who can't speak the language properly?
Because then they'd be accused of being racist? Political correctness is a scary thing.
What part of Gnomba, Komba, LinNeighborhood, smb2www, tksmb, xsmbrowser, and Konqueror don't you understand? They've all had this capability for some time.
There should be no need to write drivers, actually. As long as you have a joystick driver for your sound card (which should already exist), you can just write a program that poll()s the game port for its status. I did something similar with my serial port in order to record the signals sent out by my various remote controls. I got accuracy on the order of a few microseconds.
Essentially, they've created a fork off the 0.9.6b trunk. The version number should reflect that - maybe 0.9.6b-sc1 (for security patch 1) for example.
Hmm, maybe. I mostly rely on the package system versioning and changelogs to see what the version/status of a program is.
On the other hand, many packages have patches applied by the distributor, even for non-security problems. It's kind of a given that they'll modify the package some. They also have to be careful not to break scripts that parse the version number and expect it to match a certain string. Conversely, Mozilla actually requires distributors to change the version string if they patch it.
In conclusion, I'll concede that changed version numbers wouldn't be a bad thing for security updates, but they probably shouldn't be used for much else, given that most patches are bugfixes and don't change the program's behavior much.
As for version 1.0, I couldn't claim to guess. Some of the more mature projects have made their way to versions 3 (gcc) or 6 (Vim), but most are still not happy to call it a release yet I guess. Just for fun, I tabulated the version numbers on my home firewall (mostly utility programs, not many GUI apps): 0: 51 1: 73 2: 52 3: 22 4: 32 5: 10 Other: 17 (mostly date stamps and integer version numbers)
It is the correct version. It's OpenSSL 0.9.6b, with security patches. Maybe RedHat should have updated the date string, but the version number is right.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, on the few occasions that mplayer can't play an AVI, aviplay (uses avifile) is usually able.
If you compile mplayer without the gui, then it doesn't have skins, of course :) All you get is a window with a movie playing inside (or no window at all for fullscreen mode). It has on-screen display (like a vcr), which eliminates the need for a gui anyway, and the developers apparently put in a full-blown shell recently, also overlayed onto the video. I think these features are somewhat alpha-quality, but they should be ready Real Soon Now.
A screwed package management database. Although I've never experienced that particular problem, I've heard it can be a real pain to fix, and that it might be easier to reinstall from backup/scratch.
Then when you want to generate postscript, you print to that printer, but select "print to file", and it will write the postscript to a file.
I think postscript is more popular than PDF for sending jobs to print shops and such. Postscript was around before PDF, and it's used as a native language for many laser printers (PCL is another common printer language). Most vector drawing programs like Corel Draw and Adobe Illustrator can generate postscript, and they can also import it. Many academic papers are distributed in postscript, probably because they were written in TeX.
PDF is used more as a document exchange format. It has almost exactly the same feature-set as postscript, but it's mostly binary, and I think it's supposed to be optimized for viewing on the Web. Postscript is actually a complete programming language that focuses on vector graphics. It's human readable, but most programs produce pretty obfuscated postscript. PDF and gzipped postscript tend to be about the same size.
Postscript doesn't really get developed any more, but PDF is actively developed by Adobe. So PDF gets features added such as hyperlinks, which are especially good for indexes and tables of contents, and encryption (although Adobe's PDF encryption was pathetic last I heard).
If you're interested, Adobe has postscript and PDF pretty well documented on their web site.
In my limited experience, GS does a better PS->PDF conversion than Distiller. Conversely, Acrobat Reader on Linux seems to do a better job at PDF->PS.
There really aren't many native PDF tools per se, but it is true that many 'nix tools produce postscript, which can be easily converted to PDF. The only free tool I'm aware of that produces PDF natively is pdftex, which is available on Windows as part of the MiKTeX TeX distribution.
I've thought of making something like ZoneAlarm on Linux myself, but felt it was more of a novelty than something useful, since I find my applications pretty trustworthy as it is.
(defun viper-mode (...)) : define a function named viper-mode that does the following:
(while (read-char) (ding)) : while there is keyboard input, read a character, and beep.
That's pretty straight-forward, isn't it? If I wanted Emacs to do nothing but beep every time I pressed a key, I'd probably do something quite similar.
Oh wait. You must have missed the fact that the parent post was a joke. Serves you right for commenting about things you don't understand I guess (waits for flameage).
He said the room's lighting would be flickering at 60 Hz, not the monitor. Then the 60 Hz lighting would presumably interfere with the monitor, causing the beat pattern he described.
I believe that having so many ports in Debian greatly increases software's robustness, since different architectures' peculiarities can point out flaws in a program's logic. At the same time, most software, once it's been ported to a few architectures, will work on any other new architecture with little or no work, so there is a great cost-benefit tradeoff for adding more ports. Stuff like XFree86 can be an exception, since it's so hardware-specific, but the benefits of porting are probably still worth it. Why else would Linux work on 20 different architectures!?
Hmm, crooks usually get jailed, not just reprimanded. Too bad.
GSView (requires Ghostscript) works pretty well on Windows. It's also free beer/speech, depending on which version you get (old versions get relicensed as GPL when a new version is released). As for editing, I don't know of anything besides acrobat that edits PDF directly.
Knoppix:~$ apt-cache search beer
tnt - An AIM client for Emacs.
qbrew - homebrew recipe calculator
Side note: Slashdot doesn't let you use <pre> anymore? WTF?
I mapped it to capslock in X, after mapping my capslock key to escape in order to speed up Vim (You press escape a lot in Vim). And my right windows key is the Compose key, which lets me type characters like ÿ and Æ. Down with useless buttons!
I don't consider that a problem. That's what makes OSS so good, to me. Obviously it's not so good for people who don't work the way I do. It seems to me that the people expressing my viewpoint are often lambasted as being elitists, but I think that's rarely the case.
I'm not one of those people who wants Linux to stay "1337," by keeping all the current non-users away. Instead, I simply find it irrelevant whether people use it or not. If they do, and it works for them, good. If it doesn't work for them, no loss.
Uncompassionate bastard that I am, I only see secondary benefits to Linux becoming more popular, namely that device and software manufacturers may be more willing to enable their products to be used on Linux. But I distrust non-OSS, and they are unlikely to make their products OSS, so I would probably find that benefit rather limited.
Heh. Maybe he's waiting for another SSH vulnerability to crop up (although I'd assume by now you've blocked him from any open ports :-)
There was no real need to change the IDE code, but some people felt it was a mess and needed to be cleaned up. Unfortunately, it broke badly in the process, so the 2.4 IDE was ported to 2.5, putting things back pretty much as they were. Kernel Traffic is a good source of information about all this stuff. Of course, this is a vast oversimplification, and some of the activity was due to your standard mailing list flame war.
However, I installed Konqeror, and it did work out of the box for browsing and viewing files on the network. No initscript whatsoever is installed. All the kde services started themselves when I ran konq. I don't see one called lisa though. This may just be my distro's (Debian) doing.
smb2www also worked well, once I fixed a trivial configuration problem. That's not out-of-the-box, but I filed a bug report, so next week, it will probably work with no user effort.
I tried a couple others (Linneighborhood, komba2, xsmbrowse), and admittedly, they mount shares and make you navigate to a directory rather than letting you access the files immediately.
I apologize for being an ass; however, you made it sound like Linux users had to use smbmount directly to do any kind of browsing, which wasn't the case.
Heh, I see I have a "freak" now, cool.
What part of Gnomba, Komba, LinNeighborhood, smb2www, tksmb, xsmbrowser, and Konqueror don't you understand? They've all had this capability for some time.
It's called copyright infringement. Different crime, different law, different punishment.
There should be no need to write drivers, actually. As long as you have a joystick driver for your sound card (which should already exist), you can just write a program that poll()s the game port for its status. I did something similar with my serial port in order to record the signals sent out by my various remote controls. I got accuracy on the order of a few microseconds.
Time to use Ogg instead.
Hmm, maybe. I mostly rely on the package system versioning and changelogs to see what the version/status of a program is.
On the other hand, many packages have patches applied by the distributor, even for non-security problems. It's kind of a given that they'll modify the package some. They also have to be careful not to break scripts that parse the version number and expect it to match a certain string. Conversely, Mozilla actually requires distributors to change the version string if they patch it.
In conclusion, I'll concede that changed version numbers wouldn't be a bad thing for security updates, but they probably shouldn't be used for much else, given that most patches are bugfixes and don't change the program's behavior much.
As for version 1.0, I couldn't claim to guess. Some of the more mature projects have made their way to versions 3 (gcc) or 6 (Vim), but most are still not happy to call it a release yet I guess. Just for fun, I tabulated the version numbers on my home firewall (mostly utility programs, not many GUI apps):
0: 51
1: 73
2: 52
3: 22
4: 32
5: 10
Other: 17 (mostly date stamps and integer version numbers)
So it seems pretty well distributed to me.
It is the correct version. It's OpenSSL 0.9.6b, with security patches. Maybe RedHat should have updated the date string, but the version number is right.