My main concern is that KDE will do with KDE2 what they did to some extent with KDE1--they will abandon development on the stable KDE2 release in order to get on the the KDE3 bandwagon.
I presume, of course, that you actaully used Applix, Star Office, Koffice, Word Perfect Office 2000, and Abi Word under Linux.
I have found that the proprietary office suites are generally better than the free ones. Word Perfect has had problems with being buggy, but is an excellent office suite. Applix is not as full-featured as Word Perfect, but is a very stable and solid offering.
Star Office is a good suite, but has a lot of rough edges that Applix doesn't havem such as the inability to change the color scheme of the suite, and poorer rendering of fonts as you type the document.
And the folks who are actually using Linux anywhere near full-time on the desktop
have been conditioned to believe that paying for software is an unfair imposition on them.
Oh boy, another Winvocate speaking for us full-time Linux users again. Why am I not surprised?
Seriously, slashdot.org is, quite frankly, a software/media-pirate friendly site. So, you get a lot of people here who believe silly tripe like abolishing copyright laws. I do not think this represents the majority of Linux users.
I once heard a story about someone who was at a swap meet. He was buying some Linux software, and wrote a check. The person who received the check did not even ask for the Linux user's driver's license. When the Linux user asked why, the seller responded "Linux users are very honest people. I can trust them."
As for myself, I have bought a number of applications and even a couple of games for Linux. Word Perfect office, Applixware (two versions), Caldera's internet office suite (anyone remeber that), countless distributions (both as cheapbytes/linuxmall/lsl/linuxcentral CDs and as official CDs), Loki's Heroes of Might and Magic II, among other software.
I remember when Slashdot was a site by Linux users for Linux users. Now all the winvocates have moved in and taken over.
But, anyway, in reply to this particular winvocate.
Linux is free. Most users of Windows are pirates.
Yep. We get a lot of articles about how the RIAA is horrible for trying to stop people from stealing their music, and how the MPAA is horrible for trying to stop people from stealing their movies.
You get the source code of the OS. So what, I have never looked at the source. I never plan on looking at the source. So having
access to the source is not a good argument.
Just because you have never had to use the source does not mean that other people have not. I recently chose to use a FTP server that did not have security problems, but had a problem with making uploaded web pages unreadable. It was a one-line source code change to fix. Another time, Qmail was giving me an obscure error message (since I was doing obscure things with Qmail) that a quick glance at the source code let me track down and fix.
So why are we people using Linux? Because Linux is Cool; and they are elite and like doing things the hard way
I do not think you can speak for me. The command line has a lof of powerful tools that make complicated tasks in Windows simple in Linux. More importantly, when something does break down, I can find out what is really going on, instead of installing software at random until the problem magically goes away.
I have written a program which is designed to keep track of where and when various untrusted entities obtain email addresses. It does this by encrypting information in the actual email address, in a form that is not trivial to forge.
For example, my Yahoo member account has the word "yahoo" encrypted in the email address. The email address kiwi-nody4la is the word "sldot" (short for `slashdot') encrypted by the program.
This program also has support for encrypting time stamps (email addresses that time out), having a different encryption code for messages posted to Usenet, and encrypting the IP someone views a web page from.
The program is completely free, being under the public domain. Source can be found here:
First of all, things above 22kHz aren't picked up by ordinary mics... Even the ultra-high-end Neumann
U87Ai only claims 20-20kHz frequency response
Then again, the U87 is a large-diaphram condenser, and is more about giving a "warm" instead of an "accurate" sound.
B&K makes mics with a reponse up to 40khz (I know they are called DPA mics today, but I still call them B&Ks). B&Ks (and Genelecs) are what people use when they want a really accurate sound, as opposed to a "warm", "larger than life" sound.
That said, I agree with what you are saying. People can not hear about 20khz, and people that think they can will need to run some double-blind scientific tests to back up their claims before I will seriously listen to them.
SACDs do not utilize PCM audio at a higher encoding rate, the way the upcoming DVD/A standard will. Instead, it uses a special encoding with, basically, allows you to have higher frequencies at lower resolution or lower frequencies at higher resolution, where the base resolution is a low bit rate in the megahertz range.
Arny Kruger has a lot of misgivings about this method. First of all, it is a lot harder to code DSP for this instead of PCM. Second of all, there are apprantly problems with high-frequency artifacts that this encoding technique uses.
I also have a lot of misgivings about this method. Personally, I think the average listener thinks 16/44.1 is good enough, and has no need to listen to something at a even higher bit rate. The popularity of MP3s indicate that 16/44.1 is better sounding than what the average consumer needs.
- Sam
The problem with the RBL is that it is not opt-in
on
MAPS Sued Again
·
· Score: 3
The problem with the MAPS RBL is that it is not Opt-In. When I had a machine at Above.net, there was a time when I wished to communicate with someone at whowhere.com, but, unfortunatly, whowhere.com was on the MAPS RBL that particular day. Above.net was unwilling (or unable) to take my machine off of the RBL so I could communicate with my friend.
I also have a friend with a ifn.net account who I would not be able to communicate with if my ISP told me I could not talk to machines on the RBL.
Needless to day, I no longer have an account with Above.net.
I agree with what the RBL is doing, since the internet is a cooperative network, and people have the right to not cooperate with hosts whose content they do not like. I also am glad to see them keep dedicated connections dedicated to broadcating spam in check. That said, I do not like the fact sysadmins can make these kinds of decisions for their users.
I feel that Rijndael (Google mirror, main page slashdotted) is the best candidate because it has the following advantages over the more populsr Twofish:
Rijndael has better performance on hardware than Twofish.
Rijndael is more extensible. In addition to a variable key size, Rijndael has a variable block size.
I am very pleased to see Rijndael become the new AES standard.
There are enough subtle differences between Solaris and Linux that people comfortable with Solaris need to "shift gears" to use Linux. However, I do not think this is why Sun wants to move over to Solaris.
There is a strong mindshare among Solaris admins that Solaris is a real UNIX, and that Linux is not a "real" UNIX. Sun makes a good deal of money with this perception. Sun is not foolish--they know that if management types realize that low-cost Linux servers can do as good as a job as Solaris for a large number of intranet and internet tasks[1], they will go for a low-cost Linux investment instead of a high-cost Solaris investment.
As it stands right now, Linux is a far greater threat to Sun than it is to Microsoft, since Linux works well as a UNIX server, but yet is not as functional as Windows on the desktop[2].
- Sam
[1] There are things, such as NFS and support, where Sun/Solaris is better, of course.
[2] We're getting there. I think Kde and Gnome 2.0 coupld very well put us there.
NLS is the whole system (hyperlinking, video conferencing, etc.) that Engelbart demonstrated. According to Stanford's description of the 1968 video, Doug had already thought about making this available via the internet:
In this segment Doug explains how NLS will be used as the
infrastructure for ARPA networks experiment in creating the Network
Information Center.
Now all we need to show is proof that someone, somewhere, thought to directly access the ARPA network before 1976 via phone lines.
A few years ago, Time magazine did an excellent piece on the problems to today's society. One of the things they pointed out is that the privacy of a modern household has greatly increased the incidents of child abuse. In the society that we evolved in, one large factor that stopped people from abusing their child was the fact that there was no privacy--if you abuse your child, the whole village knew about it.
The anonimity of the internet causes similar problems.
Any system administrator knows that if they put any pornographic images on their web server, their machine or their machine's connection will quickly get overloaded. For example, one of my users put up pictures of attractive women. The women were not even naked, yet the server's connection was still overloaded.
I have heard it said that the most common term asked for in the leading search engines is "pornography". People who would normally be too embarassed to go in to a liquor store or a peep show have no problem getting porno on the net. The internet makes people do what they would not normally do.
While pornography is somewhat harmless, other activity on the internet isn't. The actions of the anonymous person who brought down Kiro5hin come to mind. As does the random bannings on many IRC channels (where the operators as often as not broke in to accounts or engaged in credit card fraud to get a system they could run a bot on to control the channel), the efforts people go to to cheat in online games, countless breakin attempts any experienced system administrator sees in their logs, the nonstop tide of spam, and so on. All of these are things that poeple do when they do not get a chance to look in the eyes of the person who they are harming with their selfish actions.
It does not surprise me that the internet is full of people who take but do not give back. Human nature has always had the takers who complain when the stuff they are not taking is not good enough for their selfish purposes, and the givers who get little in return for their giving except complaints from the takers. The anonimity of the internet makes this problem worse.
How many damn binaries whose purpose are completely undecipherable are hiding in wierd
places symbolically linked from some other strange place
With RPM-based systems (RedHat, Caldera, SuSe, etc.), you can find out where a certain file comes from thusly:
rpm -qf filename
I know what each system file does
and where it is and how they interact, and how brain-dead certain things are.
Hmmm, but do you know what each and every registry key does?
If you want a simple-to-understand Linux, one route to go is to get Slackware and install only the "A" and "N" series, installing the minimum number of packages to get up and going on the 'net.
From an advocacy standpoint, I actually prefer the complexity of Linux. A desert is far simpler than a jungle, but a jungle has far greater diversity. Linux is a jungle, with different programs doing more the less the same task competing in the evolutionary pool of Linux users. Evolution may not always be neet, but it usually generates the most interesting results.
Will developing for the Agenda be any simpler than for the Palm because it is using Linux?
Yes.
Considering that I despise one-word answers to complicated questions, I should probably go in to more detail.
The Agenda uses the FLTK for its API. If you write a FLTK application for your Linux desktop, it should be easy enough to modify it to run in the Agenda's limited display size. Cross-sompile your application, and Boom! Instant Agenda application.
The one tidbit of information I couldn't find is the expected battery life.
The expected battery life is one month off of two AAA batterys. Right now, the prototypes only last a day or two on the batteries, but they expect to considerably improve the power management.
Another thing: The display is black and white. I don't know if they have greyscale.
I got a chance to see these at LinuxWorld in San Jose earlier this week. Here are my impressions:
The devices are notacably smaller than the Palm III series, and even a little smaller than the Palm Vs. They are as thick as the Palm III, however.
The devices use an unusual RISC processor for the CPU
The devices use the FLTK toolkit, and any FLTK application for the Linux desktop should port reasonably easily to the Agenda.
The application they were showing at the LWCE was a Bash shell, probably to prove these are really Linux machines.
Input is via a on-screen QWERTY keyboard which is part of the display at the bottom. I hope it is possible to replace this keyboard by a Fitaly keyboard, or by one of the various handwriting reconition techniques.
The devices will have 2 megs of flash and 8 mega of ram. The person showing off the unit was talking about it being possible to use the flash to store application and possibly data.
The devices are expected to retail for $150
They promise to release them around October
Also, PocketLinux was also at LWCE, and has struck a deal to make Linux available for a competing handheld computer (I forget the exact brand name).
just buy the latest
subsidized console and get some very respectable hardware with the company taking the loss
This is why I do not think consoles will ever support expansion slots that allow you to hook up normal PC hardware to the console. The only way console manufactures can make a profit is by keeping everything that gives the console functionality proprietary.
As an aside, the idea to make the source code available so people have complete freedom with the software is a completely different idea than the idea of destroying a company's profit model by buying a company's loss leader and hacking it so we don't need to "buy the razors". I really wish people would not confuse the libery of having source available with the idea that it is OK to get something for nothing at a corporation's expense.
ometimes I think that there should be an anonymous counting mechanism included with the distributions.
Slackware used to do something very similar to this--after you installed it, root would have a letter in her mailbox from the Linux Counter, telling you how to be added to the Linux counter.
In fact, the most tangible proof that I have been using Linux since 1995 is my counter number and registration.
ON THE BOX THEY SAY 30 DAYS OF SUPPORT except for some advanced customization: I don't consider envelope masquerading for redirecting my and my wife's mail _advanced customization_.
I hate to break this to you, but envelope masquerading, or anything else the requires hacking at sendmail's configuration files, is "advanced customization". If you want to get a sense of the kinds of questions SuSE probably gets all the time, look at comp.os.linux.misc on Usenet sometime.
Their rule is probably "If it can't be done with YaST, we won't touch it".
My take on the whole Napster thing is that they should be shut down. Pirating music is, plain and simple, a form of stealing. No whining about the "future of music" and how "the RIAA can't shut us down" is going to change this fact.
Shutting down Napster is not about stopping piracy. Shutting down Napster is making a statement that piracy is wrong, and any company that bases their profit model on the stealing of other people's works will be shut down.
I don't mind piracy when people do it under the covers of IRC and underground programs like Gnutella. The underground nature of these programs gives the end user a reminder that they are doing something naughty. I do mind piracy when a comapny like Napster tries to tell us that piracy is OK, and a God-given right.
There is one premise that this review has that is plain simply not true:
The premise that the latest version of a given software package is the most secure.
Wrong.
There are numerous cases where newer software packages have introduced new security hole.s For example, Pam added some features, and in the process, added a new local->root hole. When the ISC added a new feature to BIND, the new feature had a, you got it, remote root hole. The capability features to the 2.2.x kernels added new security concerns. And so on.
To say that Debian is insecure because it has not had a major update is just plain silly. Does he also think that OpenBSD is insecure because it still uses BIND 4.x instead of the latest and greatest Bind 8.x? For the record, I am a RedHat and not a Debian user.
The article also did not look at things like "How many services does this distro run out of the box?".
- Sam
John Carmack already did this
on
MacOSX and X11
·
· Score: 4
The first port of X11 to OsX was done by John Carmack. In fact, I would not be surprised if he has something informitive to say about this X11 port.
Slashdot Mirror
My main concern is that KDE will do with KDE2 what they did to some extent with KDE1--they will abandon development on the stable KDE2 release in order to get on the the KDE3 bandwagon.
- Sam
I have found that the proprietary office suites are generally better than the free ones. Word Perfect has had problems with being buggy, but is an excellent office suite. Applix is not as full-featured as Word Perfect, but is a very stable and solid offering.
Star Office is a good suite, but has a lot of rough edges that Applix doesn't havem such as the inability to change the color scheme of the suite, and poorer rendering of fonts as you type the document.
- Sam
Seriously, slashdot.org is, quite frankly, a software/media-pirate friendly site. So, you get a lot of people here who believe silly tripe like abolishing copyright laws. I do not think this represents the majority of Linux users.
I once heard a story about someone who was at a swap meet. He was buying some Linux software, and wrote a check. The person who received the check did not even ask for the Linux user's driver's license. When the Linux user asked why, the seller responded "Linux users are very honest people. I can trust them."
As for myself, I have bought a number of applications and even a couple of games for Linux. Word Perfect office, Applixware (two versions), Caldera's internet office suite (anyone remeber that), countless distributions (both as cheapbytes/linuxmall/lsl/linuxcentral CDs and as official CDs), Loki's Heroes of Might and Magic II, among other software.
- Sam
I remember when Slashdot was a site by Linux users for Linux users. Now all the winvocates have moved in and taken over.
But, anyway, in reply to this particular winvocate.
Yep. We get a lot of articles about how the RIAA is horrible for trying to stop people from stealing their music, and how the MPAA is horrible for trying to stop people from stealing their movies. Just because you have never had to use the source does not mean that other people have not. I recently chose to use a FTP server that did not have security problems, but had a problem with making uploaded web pages unreadable. It was a one-line source code change to fix. Another time, Qmail was giving me an obscure error message (since I was doing obscure things with Qmail) that a quick glance at the source code let me track down and fix. I do not think you can speak for me. The command line has a lof of powerful tools that make complicated tasks in Windows simple in Linux. More importantly, when something does break down, I can find out what is really going on, instead of installing software at random until the problem magically goes away.- Sam
For example, my Yahoo member account has the word "yahoo" encrypted in the email address. The email address kiwi-nody4la is the word "sldot" (short for `slashdot') encrypted by the program.
This program also has support for encrypting time stamps (email addresses that time out), having a different encryption code for messages posted to Usenet, and encrypting the IP someone views a web page from.
The program is completely free, being under the public domain. Source can be found here:
B&K makes mics with a reponse up to 40khz (I know they are called DPA mics today, but I still call them B&Ks). B&Ks (and Genelecs) are what people use when they want a really accurate sound, as opposed to a "warm", "larger than life" sound.
That said, I agree with what you are saying. People can not hear about 20khz, and people that think they can will need to run some double-blind scientific tests to back up their claims before I will seriously listen to them.
- Sam
Arny Kruger has a lot of misgivings about this method. First of all, it is a lot harder to code DSP for this instead of PCM. Second of all, there are apprantly problems with high-frequency artifacts that this encoding technique uses.
I also have a lot of misgivings about this method. Personally, I think the average listener thinks 16/44.1 is good enough, and has no need to listen to something at a even higher bit rate. The popularity of MP3s indicate that 16/44.1 is better sounding than what the average consumer needs.
- Sam
The problem with the MAPS RBL is that it is not Opt-In. When I had a machine at Above.net, there was a time when I wished to communicate with someone at whowhere.com, but, unfortunatly, whowhere.com was on the MAPS RBL that particular day. Above.net was unwilling (or unable) to take my machine off of the RBL so I could communicate with my friend.
I also have a friend with a ifn.net account who I would not be able to communicate with if my ISP told me I could not talk to machines on the RBL.
Needless to day, I no longer have an account with Above.net.
I agree with what the RBL is doing, since the internet is a cooperative network, and people have the right to not cooperate with hosts whose content they do not like. I also am glad to see them keep dedicated connections dedicated to broadcating spam in check. That said, I do not like the fact sysadmins can make these kinds of decisions for their users.
- Sam
- Sam
- Rijndael has better performance on hardware than Twofish.
- Rijndael is more extensible. In addition to a variable key size, Rijndael has a variable block size.
I am very pleased to see Rijndael become the new AES standard.BTW, you pronounce it "Rain Doll".
- Sam
There is a strong mindshare among Solaris admins that Solaris is a real UNIX, and that Linux is not a "real" UNIX. Sun makes a good deal of money with this perception. Sun is not foolish--they know that if management types realize that low-cost Linux servers can do as good as a job as Solaris for a large number of intranet and internet tasks[1], they will go for a low-cost Linux investment instead of a high-cost Solaris investment.
As it stands right now, Linux is a far greater threat to Sun than it is to Microsoft, since Linux works well as a UNIX server, but yet is not as functional as Windows on the desktop[2].
- Sam
[1] There are things, such as NFS and support, where Sun/Solaris is better, of course.
[2] We're getting there. I think Kde and Gnome 2.0 coupld very well put us there.
Now all we need to show is proof that someone, somewhere, thought to directly access the ARPA network before 1976 via phone lines.
- Sam
Anonimity definitely has a dark side.
A few years ago, Time magazine did an excellent piece on the problems to today's society. One of the things they pointed out is that the privacy of a modern household has greatly increased the incidents of child abuse. In the society that we evolved in, one large factor that stopped people from abusing their child was the fact that there was no privacy--if you abuse your child, the whole village knew about it.
The anonimity of the internet causes similar problems.
Any system administrator knows that if they put any pornographic images on their web server, their machine or their machine's connection will quickly get overloaded. For example, one of my users put up pictures of attractive women. The women were not even naked, yet the server's connection was still overloaded.
I have heard it said that the most common term asked for in the leading search engines is "pornography". People who would normally be too embarassed to go in to a liquor store or a peep show have no problem getting porno on the net. The internet makes people do what they would not normally do.
While pornography is somewhat harmless, other activity on the internet isn't. The actions of the anonymous person who brought down Kiro5hin come to mind. As does the random bannings on many IRC channels (where the operators as often as not broke in to accounts or engaged in credit card fraud to get a system they could run a bot on to control the channel), the efforts people go to to cheat in online games, countless breakin attempts any experienced system administrator sees in their logs, the nonstop tide of spam, and so on. All of these are things that poeple do when they do not get a chance to look in the eyes of the person who they are harming with their selfish actions.
It does not surprise me that the internet is full of people who take but do not give back. Human nature has always had the takers who complain when the stuff they are not taking is not good enough for their selfish purposes, and the givers who get little in return for their giving except complaints from the takers. The anonimity of the internet makes this problem worse.
Anyway, that is my rant of the day. Time to go back to coding my current open-source project.
- Sam
I don't think so, considering that PalmOS 3.5 is 1.5 megs.
In that 1.5 megs, you get a really nice API that blows away anything a 360k DOS had.
- Sam
With RPM-based systems (RedHat, Caldera, SuSe, etc.), you can find out where a certain file comes from thusly:
I know what each system file does and where it is and how they interact, and how brain-dead certain things are.
Hmmm, but do you know what each and every registry key does?
If you want a simple-to-understand Linux, one route to go is to get Slackware and install only the "A" and "N" series, installing the minimum number of packages to get up and going on the 'net.
From an advocacy standpoint, I actually prefer the complexity of Linux. A desert is far simpler than a jungle, but a jungle has far greater diversity. Linux is a jungle, with different programs doing more the less the same task competing in the evolutionary pool of Linux users. Evolution may not always be neet, but it usually generates the most interesting results.
- Sam
Yes.
Considering that I despise one-word answers to complicated questions, I should probably go in to more detail.
The Agenda uses the FLTK for its API. If you write a FLTK application for your Linux desktop, it should be easy enough to modify it to run in the Agenda's limited display size. Cross-sompile your application, and Boom! Instant Agenda application.
- Sam
The expected battery life is one month off of two AAA batterys. Right now, the prototypes only last a day or two on the batteries, but they expect to considerably improve the power management.
Another thing: The display is black and white. I don't know if they have greyscale.
- Sam
- The devices are notacably smaller than the Palm III series, and even a little smaller than the Palm Vs. They are as thick as the Palm III, however.
- The devices use an unusual RISC processor for the CPU
- The devices use the FLTK toolkit, and any FLTK application for the Linux desktop should port reasonably easily to the Agenda.
- The application they were showing at the LWCE was a Bash shell, probably to prove these are really Linux machines.
- Input is via a on-screen QWERTY keyboard which is part of the display at the bottom. I hope it is possible to replace this keyboard by a Fitaly keyboard, or by one of the various handwriting reconition techniques.
- The devices will have 2 megs of flash and 8 mega of ram. The person showing off the unit was talking about it being possible to use the flash to store application and possibly data.
- The devices are expected to retail for $150
- They promise to release them around October
Also, PocketLinux was also at LWCE, and has struck a deal to make Linux available for a competing handheld computer (I forget the exact brand name).- Sam
The genie has granted your wish
- Sam
This is why I do not think consoles will ever support expansion slots that allow you to hook up normal PC hardware to the console. The only way console manufactures can make a profit is by keeping everything that gives the console functionality proprietary.
As an aside, the idea to make the source code available so people have complete freedom with the software is a completely different idea than the idea of destroying a company's profit model by buying a company's loss leader and hacking it so we don't need to "buy the razors". I really wish people would not confuse the libery of having source available with the idea that it is OK to get something for nothing at a corporation's expense.
- Sam
Slackware used to do something very similar to this--after you installed it, root would have a letter in her mailbox from the Linux Counter, telling you how to be added to the Linux counter.
In fact, the most tangible proof that I have been using Linux since 1995 is my counter number and registration.
- Sam
I hate to break this to you, but envelope masquerading, or anything else the requires hacking at sendmail's configuration files, is "advanced customization". If you want to get a sense of the kinds of questions SuSE probably gets all the time, look at comp.os.linux.misc on Usenet sometime.
Their rule is probably "If it can't be done with YaST, we won't touch it".
- Sam
My take on the whole Napster thing is that they should be shut down. Pirating music is, plain and simple, a form of stealing. No whining about the "future of music" and how "the RIAA can't shut us down" is going to change this fact.
Shutting down Napster is not about stopping piracy. Shutting down Napster is making a statement that piracy is wrong, and any company that bases their profit model on the stealing of other people's works will be shut down.
I don't mind piracy when people do it under the covers of IRC and underground programs like Gnutella. The underground nature of these programs gives the end user a reminder that they are doing something naughty. I do mind piracy when a comapny like Napster tries to tell us that piracy is OK, and a God-given right.
Just my two cents.
- Sam
There are numerous cases where newer software packages have introduced new security hole.s For example, Pam added some features, and in the process, added a new local->root hole. When the ISC added a new feature to BIND, the new feature had a, you got it, remote root hole. The capability features to the 2.2.x kernels added new security concerns. And so on.
To say that Debian is insecure because it has not had a major update is just plain silly. Does he also think that OpenBSD is insecure because it still uses BIND 4.x instead of the latest and greatest Bind 8.x? For the record, I am a RedHat and not a Debian user.
The article also did not look at things like "How many services does this distro run out of the box?".
- Sam
- Sam