They were using the old machines as dumb terminals, so all the apps were running on a backend server somewhere... Also with shared libraries and a large disk cache openoffice would open very quickly, the first user to login would take longer but he'd have all the power of the backend server at his disposal, and subsequent users would be loading it from disk cache and with most of the shared libraries already resident.
But that just converts your printed output (postscript) to pdf, which all unix apps can do already, just print to a file and use ps2pdf to convert them... But doing it this way doesn't let you create tagged pdf's, hyperlinks within the pdf for instance.
But the difference is.. the pro-ms studies are funded by ms, ie by people with a vested interest in the outcome.. This study was not funded by openoffice, it was done by end users who had their own needs in mind.
Looks like its checking for open proxies, kinda makes sense to do that especially if your posting as AC, as trolls will often flood open forums like slashdot with garbage posts via proxies.
Re:No one size fits all answer but here is mine :)
on
Linux Clustering Hardware?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
There are cheaper vendors out there than sun. Sun are known for producing premium hardware whereas dell are known for producing bargain bucket hardware... A better comparison would be to look at a vendor who produces both xeon and opteron hardware, such as HP or IBM.
Why would you use VNC to access a solaris system? Solaris supports X11 by default, and that's much faster and actually designed for the purpose... You can also use NX to make X11 run faster over a slow link. I wouldn't recommend VNC on solaris or modern versions of windows, it only has uses on older versions of windows which don't have a native remote access system..
To answer a few of these things.. Meta tags are optional, you dont need to specify them.. The DOCTYPE is there so the browser can instantly identify what type of document it is, and therefore how to render it. Sure the browser will try to guess what it is based on the content, but because people write bad html code that's often very difficult to do. If a website deviates from a standard, it's usually due to laziness on the part of the webmaster, it's VERY rare that there's something you can't do by following the standards, and in these rare cases you should propose an extension to the standard, the w3c would include it if it provided a genuine benefit. As for your talk about how standards would slow progress, look at how much progress on the web has slowed since msie has been the dominant browser, everything has stagnated, ie hasn't recieved any major new features for YEARS.. Because of the dominance of ie, web development has STALLED. As for bugs being fixed quickly in mainstream products, this is often not the case atall.. Read http://secunia.com/product/11/ - many vulns found in IE have not been fixed atall yet, while other vulns took a long time to be patched.. As for joe's accessible browser, if joe is still maintaining it on his own and using it himself, then he is easier to contact and more likely to fix the problem (he won't want to get infected with anything himself) and if it's opensource then other users are likely to fix it if he doesn't. As for memorising the tags, what's wrong with that? would you write a C program and leave out some functions? would you write assembly and leave out instructions? HTML/XML are just machine-parsed languages too, and if you want power/flexibility you need complexity. There are plenty of graphical tools for generating HTML too.. browsers should never have been made tollerant of errors, this just encourages bad code... C compilers which tollerate errors cause exactly the same problem, signed/unsigned comparisons for instance can be exploited, and most compilers just warn about them rather than generating an error and halting the compilation. If browsers and compilers were more pedantic and stopped on errors, the quality of code would be MUCH higher.
VNC is uselessly slow, but it's really just a hack.. It basically dumps screenshots over the screen, tho it does a few tricks like compression and only sending changed areas, but its slow as all hell.. RDP on the other hand, is closer to X11, they hooked into the API calls for drawing pixels and forward them through. X11 on the other hand was designed to do this from the ground up.. You can connect to RDP from linux, look at www.rdesktop.org, and it's WAY faster than VNC.. And you can attach to the root console with RDP.
Firefox is not the web, if you cannot use firefox because your blind or whatever, then dont use it.. There are plenty of other browsers out there. Forcing someone to use a single browser WHATEVER the reason is what i'm against, and creating sites which deviate from standards means it's harder for people to create dedicated browsers designed for the disabled, it's necessary to bolt on to another browser, which is a bad thing, you should use purpose built tools and not hacks to existing tools, you dont use the handle of a screwdriver to hammer a nail in!
The number of people leaving cuba is no higher (relative to population) than the number of people leaving other south-american countries such as mexico or brazil.
And how about burma? The government over there isn't too friendly either.. Seems the Americans would rather just ignore such regimes unless they have lots of oil.
I doubt they buy from the american vendors, buying hardware from asian vendors is usually cheaper and there are no sanctions between cuba and asian countries.
Cuba has every right to do that, microsoft only has the right to refuse to sell their software to cuba. Once it enters cuba, it falls under cuban law, and if cuban law says it can be distributed freely, then it can be distributed freely within cuba.
And those pages should be boycotted and their authors contacted. The web was meant to be accessible to all, not only to those who pay the microsoft tax. And before you say it, i'm not anti microsoft, i'm pro freedom/choice. I want to be able to view websites using any program i wish on any device that i wish, the web was designed to be accessible to all and this goes totally against that principle. I was equally frustrated when netscape 1.x came around and implemented all kinds of propriatory extensions which weren't in the proper html specs, i thus avoided netscape on principle and definately won't stop doing so now.
This would stop firefox being a proper cross-platform browser, which is one of it's biggest advantages. What we need, is to get rid of ie-only sites completely, and the best way to do this is to increase the usage of non ie browsers so that website authors have to produce standards compliant sites if they dont want to alienate a significant portion of their potential customers. And, users should be alienated, rather than just capitulating and using ie, if users do that then site authors will just expect that to happen, and not bother fixing their site. And those of us who cant/wont run windows will not be able to access sites. And that includes mac users, the mac version of ie has far better css support than the windows version, but doesn't implement most of the propriatory stuff or many of the bugs present in the windows version.. Sites viewed with ie/mac look very similar to pre 1.x versions of mozilla.
And if i ran the IT department at a government agency, i might consider setting up a fake wireless network that's not connected to anything else just to see who might try to connect.. Interestingly, there is a wireless network called "MI5 Network" that appears to be located in an apartment near the MI5 headquarters in london. It's just some guy's home network, but because of it's name and location people might mistake it for something else.
Firefox does let you prevent sites override the statusbar text, its under the "advanced" javascript options in the settings..
And as for not letting you press ctrl+U, yeah that's annoying but has more to do with GTK2 than firefox, other GTK2 apps behave this way too, and firefox let you ctrl+U when it was compiled with GTK1.. There is a workaround however, create a file called.gtkrc-2.0 in your home directory and add the line: gtk-key-theme-name = "Emacs"
I couldn't live without this option myself, very usefull.
I've not had any difficulties changing mac address, ifconfig eth1 hw ether macaddresshere, same as you would with an ethernet card.. Worked with several different types of card too.
Which is why the update page has the facility to rate extensions, crap extensions theoretically should get low ratings.. Works similar to the moderation system in slashdot. But yes, i have seen lots of poor extensions... switchproxy causes my machine to take over 30 seconds to open a new browser window, and many extensions phone home to check for updates, which doesn't work very well if your on an isolated network, or if the update server is timing out. These extensions tend to freeze the browser until they're done!
I doubt all the code in any commercial os was produced in the US. Virtually every commercial OS out there is a mix of products bought from other companies, licensed code from other companies and code written by outsource programmers. I partly agree with the policy you talk about tho, but i believe it should be more along the lines of: You must buy software which has been checked and built by the government. Any software vendor should supply the sourcecode for the government to audit and compile into a useable system for use by other government bodies. If it happens to be commercial software, then the government body handling the auditing and compilation can collect the fees for it and pass the royalties on to the vendor.
In the case of software, i believe the government should always demand sourcecode regardless of where they obtain the software from. Obviously give preference to local suppliers, but REQUIRE sourcecode from all suppliers. Infact, i think anyone should demand sourcecode, you never know what might be hiding in a binary, and by trusting someone else so implicitely, especially a foreign company is incredibly irresponsible especially for a government. As for foreign suppliers, the chinese are right to favour local suppliers and i wish the british government would do the same, the british computer makers (sinclair, amstrad, acorn) have all but disappeared in the last 20 years.
On the contrary, i'm sure the chinese government would love server-side applications. They control the servers and the people use them. Accessing servers in a foreign country will cause latency so it makes sense to have apps locally anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
They were using the old machines as dumb terminals, so all the apps were running on a backend server somewhere... Also with shared libraries and a large disk cache openoffice would open very quickly, the first user to login would take longer but he'd have all the power of the backend server at his disposal, and subsequent users would be loading it from disk cache and with most of the shared libraries already resident.
But that just converts your printed output (postscript) to pdf, which all unix apps can do already, just print to a file and use ps2pdf to convert them...
But doing it this way doesn't let you create tagged pdf's, hyperlinks within the pdf for instance.
But the difference is..
the pro-ms studies are funded by ms, ie by people with a vested interest in the outcome.. This study was not funded by openoffice, it was done by end users who had their own needs in mind.
Looks like its checking for open proxies, kinda makes sense to do that especially if your posting as AC, as trolls will often flood open forums like slashdot with garbage posts via proxies.
There are cheaper vendors out there than sun. Sun are known for producing premium hardware whereas dell are known for producing bargain bucket hardware... A better comparison would be to look at a vendor who produces both xeon and opteron hardware, such as HP or IBM.
Why would you use VNC to access a solaris system? Solaris supports X11 by default, and that's much faster and actually designed for the purpose... You can also use NX to make X11 run faster over a slow link. I wouldn't recommend VNC on solaris or modern versions of windows, it only has uses on older versions of windows which don't have a native remote access system..
To answer a few of these things..
Meta tags are optional, you dont need to specify them..
The DOCTYPE is there so the browser can instantly identify what type of document it is, and therefore how to render it. Sure the browser will try to guess what it is based on the content, but because people write bad html code that's often very difficult to do.
If a website deviates from a standard, it's usually due to laziness on the part of the webmaster, it's VERY rare that there's something you can't do by following the standards, and in these rare cases you should propose an extension to the standard, the w3c would include it if it provided a genuine benefit.
As for your talk about how standards would slow progress, look at how much progress on the web has slowed since msie has been the dominant browser, everything has stagnated, ie hasn't recieved any major new features for YEARS.. Because of the dominance of ie, web development has STALLED.
As for bugs being fixed quickly in mainstream products, this is often not the case atall.. Read http://secunia.com/product/11/ - many vulns found in IE have not been fixed atall yet, while other vulns took a long time to be patched.. As for joe's accessible browser, if joe is still maintaining it on his own and using it himself, then he is easier to contact and more likely to fix the problem (he won't want to get infected with anything himself) and if it's opensource then other users are likely to fix it if he doesn't.
As for memorising the tags, what's wrong with that? would you write a C program and leave out some functions? would you write assembly and leave out instructions? HTML/XML are just machine-parsed languages too, and if you want power/flexibility you need complexity. There are plenty of graphical tools for generating HTML too.. browsers should never have been made tollerant of errors, this just encourages bad code... C compilers which tollerate errors cause exactly the same problem, signed/unsigned comparisons for instance can be exploited, and most compilers just warn about them rather than generating an error and halting the compilation.
If browsers and compilers were more pedantic and stopped on errors, the quality of code would be MUCH higher.
Actually, VNC is horrendously slow on OSX too, but it's very fast on X11 i agree, mainly because X is designed with remote displays in mind.
VNC is uselessly slow, but it's really just a hack.. It basically dumps screenshots over the screen, tho it does a few tricks like compression and only sending changed areas, but its slow as all hell..
RDP on the other hand, is closer to X11, they hooked into the API calls for drawing pixels and forward them through. X11 on the other hand was designed to do this from the ground up..
You can connect to RDP from linux, look at www.rdesktop.org, and it's WAY faster than VNC.. And you can attach to the root console with RDP.
Firefox is not the web, if you cannot use firefox because your blind or whatever, then dont use it.. There are plenty of other browsers out there. Forcing someone to use a single browser WHATEVER the reason is what i'm against, and creating sites which deviate from standards means it's harder for people to create dedicated browsers designed for the disabled, it's necessary to bolt on to another browser, which is a bad thing, you should use purpose built tools and not hacks to existing tools, you dont use the handle of a screwdriver to hammer a nail in!
The number of people leaving cuba is no higher (relative to population) than the number of people leaving other south-american countries such as mexico or brazil.
And how about burma? The government over there isn't too friendly either.. Seems the Americans would rather just ignore such regimes unless they have lots of oil.
I doubt they buy from the american vendors, buying hardware from asian vendors is usually cheaper and there are no sanctions between cuba and asian countries.
Cuba has every right to do that, microsoft only has the right to refuse to sell their software to cuba. Once it enters cuba, it falls under cuban law, and if cuban law says it can be distributed freely, then it can be distributed freely within cuba.
Not to mention the fact that windows is an american product, and therefor illegal to export to cuba.
And those pages should be boycotted and their authors contacted. The web was meant to be accessible to all, not only to those who pay the microsoft tax. And before you say it, i'm not anti microsoft, i'm pro freedom/choice. I want to be able to view websites using any program i wish on any device that i wish, the web was designed to be accessible to all and this goes totally against that principle. I was equally frustrated when netscape 1.x came around and implemented all kinds of propriatory extensions which weren't in the proper html specs, i thus avoided netscape on principle and definately won't stop doing so now.
This would stop firefox being a proper cross-platform browser, which is one of it's biggest advantages. What we need, is to get rid of ie-only sites completely, and the best way to do this is to increase the usage of non ie browsers so that website authors have to produce standards compliant sites if they dont want to alienate a significant portion of their potential customers. And, users should be alienated, rather than just capitulating and using ie, if users do that then site authors will just expect that to happen, and not bother fixing their site. And those of us who cant/wont run windows will not be able to access sites. And that includes mac users, the mac version of ie has far better css support than the windows version, but doesn't implement most of the propriatory stuff or many of the bugs present in the windows version.. Sites viewed with ie/mac look very similar to pre 1.x versions of mozilla.
And if i ran the IT department at a government agency, i might consider setting up a fake wireless network that's not connected to anything else just to see who might try to connect..
Interestingly, there is a wireless network called "MI5 Network" that appears to be located in an apartment near the MI5 headquarters in london. It's just some guy's home network, but because of it's name and location people might mistake it for something else.
Firefox does let you prevent sites override the statusbar text, its under the "advanced" javascript options in the settings..
.gtkrc-2.0 in your home directory and add the line:
And as for not letting you press ctrl+U, yeah that's annoying but has more to do with GTK2 than firefox, other GTK2 apps behave this way too, and firefox let you ctrl+U when it was compiled with GTK1.. There is a workaround however, create a file called
gtk-key-theme-name = "Emacs"
I couldn't live without this option myself, very usefull.
I've not had any difficulties changing mac address, ifconfig eth1 hw ether macaddresshere, same as you would with an ethernet card.. Worked with several different types of card too.
Which is why the update page has the facility to rate extensions, crap extensions theoretically should get low ratings.. Works similar to the moderation system in slashdot.
But yes, i have seen lots of poor extensions... switchproxy causes my machine to take over 30 seconds to open a new browser window, and many extensions phone home to check for updates, which doesn't work very well if your on an isolated network, or if the update server is timing out. These extensions tend to freeze the browser until they're done!
What we need, is a way to package up firefox and a set of extensions into a single package to be installed.
I doubt all the code in any commercial os was produced in the US. Virtually every commercial OS out there is a mix of products bought from other companies, licensed code from other companies and code written by outsource programmers.
I partly agree with the policy you talk about tho, but i believe it should be more along the lines of:
You must buy software which has been checked and built by the government. Any software vendor should supply the sourcecode for the government to audit and compile into a useable system for use by other government bodies. If it happens to be commercial software, then the government body handling the auditing and compilation can collect the fees for it and pass the royalties on to the vendor.
In the case of software, i believe the government should always demand sourcecode regardless of where they obtain the software from. Obviously give preference to local suppliers, but REQUIRE sourcecode from all suppliers. Infact, i think anyone should demand sourcecode, you never know what might be hiding in a binary, and by trusting someone else so implicitely, especially a foreign company is incredibly irresponsible especially for a government.
As for foreign suppliers, the chinese are right to favour local suppliers and i wish the british government would do the same, the british computer makers (sinclair, amstrad, acorn) have all but disappeared in the last 20 years.
On the contrary, i'm sure the chinese government would love server-side applications. They control the servers and the people use them. Accessing servers in a foreign country will cause latency so it makes sense to have apps locally anyway.