Disagree with the telcom, and we cut your service!
What! That's outrageous! Why should the slashdot admins cut off my service just because I disagree with the telecom. I mean, I can understand the telecom cutting me of themselves, but this goes WAY too far!
Having government eskrow will not stop criminals at all. Criminals have an almost endless number of ways of communicating. If you introduce government or police snooping into a technology, the criminals will simply choose another method. They will see snooping as damage and route around it. All you will have achieved yet again is reducing the privacy of all the remaining law abiding citizens.
As for protecting children from paedophiles, all you do by decrypting their communication is scare them from that method of comminucation on to another. And even if you managed to snoop ALL their electronic communication what would that achieve? It's simple, they wouldn't communicate electronically, just how they used to before the internet.
Frankly, I am sick of hearing that its okay to invade our privacy for these sorts of reasons. It's not okay, it doesn't help in the long term.
Some people seem to have forgotten that peadophiles existed long before the nasty evil internet did. And the problem then was the same as the problem now. ie, there are some sick fucks in society. It's a social problem that desperately needs a solution. Please stop trying to solve it be technical means. It won't work.
> Will gnome 1.4 include text anti-aliasing and RGB decimation support?
Gnome 1.4 is based on gtk+ 1.2 just as Gnome 1.2 is. In other words, no. There will be no anti-aliased text support yet.
There are patches available which give aa text to gtk+ 1.2, (ie, gnome 1.2 and 1.4 will have it) but the patches seem unlikely to make it into the main tree. It seems they are not very cleanly implemented. This is because the gdk api for fonts in 1.2 is poorly suited to anything other that old fashioned x-fonts.
In the upcoming gtk+ 2.0 this is MUCH better. Pango is used for all the fonts and will of course give us the long awaited aa text. Unfortunately, source and binary compatibility is broken by gtk+ 2.0, so apps will have to be modified to use it. Gnome 2.0 will use gtk+ 2.0
Have a look at this page (written back in July 98), which compares libc with glibc.
In particular:
"Programs compiled to use libc 5 will not run with glibc, and vice versa. However, glibc includes support for "symbol versioning". This will virtually eliminate the need for another incompatible libc switchover, like the one from libc 5 to glibc, to ever happen again."
In other words, you can have multiple versions of libc installed alongside each other and applications that use either will work. I have libc2.1 and 2.2 applications both running right now on my mandrake linux desktop.
Sounds like a reasonable idea, but wouldn't usermode linux for example be better? It would give much the same results but without the virtualisation overhead. Also, it would not be restricted to x86.
So what do you say to the ppl whose boxes are exploited in the meantime?
BIND user: My box was exploited because of a buffer overflow bug that we didn't know existed.
BIND bug ppl: Ah yes, we knew about that but we didn't tell anyone in case script kids heard about it.
BIND user: Great. Now all our top secret info had been stolen and it could have been prevented. If you made the bug public then WE could have decided what was best, and possibly taken the machine(s) offline until there is a fix.
Think of it this way. If it was discovered that there was a really easy way of unlocking all existing house doors, would you want that information hiding temporarily in case criminals learned about it or would you want to know so you could at least have a chance to board up the doors if you thought it was neccesary. Making the expolit information available to all admins (regardless of whether the hax0rz also know) puts the admins in control which is the right thing to do.
Also, the problem with this stupid idea of limiting information spread is that it assumes the script kids are more on the ball than the admins. If that _is_ true, then _that_ is the problem that needs solving because in the end a poorly administered box will always be cracked however slowly or quickly you get the exploit info out.
You think the individual freedom the ISPs users had in the UK is the cause of child abuse and child porn? Have you seen any statistics about reports of and detection of these crimes and how they have changed since the popularity of the internet? Do you know how these criminals operate?
Given the choices (a) and (b) that you propose, I would agree but they are not the choices we are presented with. The real choices are:
(a) Remove the rights of innocent users in case they might do something wrong in future. This will make the uninformed public feel safer whilst actually doing no good at all.
(b) Allow individual freedom to innocent citizens (unless and until they are proven guilty) This also has no effect on crime.
Why are you talking about the IRA and "criminal materials" and child porn?
In case you didn't realise, these things have been going on for a long time, since well before the internet was popular, and you haven't said one thing to suggest that the internet is making any of these problems worse. Would you know how to go about getting hold of a gun in the UK? I can tell you one thing - you wouldn't look on the internet.
I am by no means an expert, but it seems there are some bad ideas floating around here.
Firstly, this is not gtk+ becoming bloated. If it's been done in line with how gtk+ was originally written, the framebuffer support is not actually in libgtk+ but in libgdk. libgdk is a later below the widget set itself, and until now has been a fairly simple wrapper around x primitives. No doubt, gtk+ has also changed because of this but don't expect to see X specific or framebuffer specific or anything else specific code in libgtk+ itself.
Secondly, I think the article is not correct to say you can now write a gnome app. I might be wrong, but i believe gnome requires X right now which i believe is a design mistake due to lack of orthogonality. (Note: I havent looked at gnome for a long time, so I may be wrong - apologies to gnome developers if so)
Re:A year of Linux : Summery
on
A Year of Linux
·
· Score: 4
> any window manager my grandmother has to first compile is not innately "user-friendly"
You're absoultely right. I wouldn't use any window manager your grandmother has to compile either. I don't even know how to contact her to do it, and in any case she probably wants to be doing her own compiles, not mine.
I feel sure the manufacturers of the drives will make whatever they think ppl will buy. They don't care so much about other ppls content as long as their drives sell.
We will see non-compliant drives even if this standard is widely accepted (which it won't be) just like dvd makers now seem to "forget" to strictly apply region code checks.
No we are not. We are talking about drive manufacturers and retailers. They make and sell the drives that people buy.
When was the last time you bought a MPAA hard drive?
If you are worried about your operating system refusing to work with existing drives then dont use an operating system that doesn't give you the choice.
Why is a replacement for IDE being designed now? What's wrong with SCSI? Can this do something that SCSI cannot? I recently changed over to SCSI and I couldn't be happier.
> The only people who use port scanners are script kiddies and hackers.
I used a portscanner this morning on our internal network. The problem was, we have no domain names and I had forgotten the IP of the machine i was looking for, but I know roughly which ports were open. Scanning quickly found it for me.
Okay, this was on a private network so its an entirely different matter, but it helps illustrate my point which is this: Just because SOME people (ie, you) can't think of a legitimate use for a tool and you CAN think of a bad use, doesn't mean it is a bad tool.
I would also add that (mainstream & non-techie) people are more likely to have heard of all the bad and evil things that can happen with these tools, and unlikely to have heard of legitimate uses. This is simply bacause legitimate use of what is after all an incredibly dull piece of software does not make interesting reading. Talk of hacking, cracking, e-fraud, espionage, etc. sells papers and increases page hits.
One good solution is to have a per-site (or patter matched sites) configuration so you can allow javascript, java, even picture loading (for slow sites) etc only for the sites you choose.
Something similar to this has already been done in one of the Amiga browsers (probably ibrowse or voyager, I cant remember) and I found it useful.
Will the manufacturers have to pay royalties for replaying mp3? I for one would rather they used ogg and didnt' charge me the extra. If we're going to have a new standard (and hence new cd writing software to make it a smooth experiEnce) we might as well push for a patent free format also IMO.
In reality of course, mp3 is too popular to support only ogg, but including it as an option can't be that much more effort can it?
>Drivers are only available for Windows 95, 98, ME and 2000, so Linux, Macintosh, BeOS, NT 4.0 and other users are not able to use it.
This is not quite true. If you look for example at the demon.net (who use BTs hardware for the access) pages you will see that only Windows is _supported_, but drivers exist for others and you are allowed to use them.
> Other privatised industries are just as bad. Our railways are an utter shambles.
I agree with the symptoms you observe, but I think personally think it's a problem of monopoly, not of privatisation. All privatiised industries I can think of where competition exists (eg gas, electricity) are now much more efficient than previouly (but this it getting offtopic.)
I agree, which is why I pointed out twice that I'm in the minority. All I'm saying is there are some people who don't want an operating system that blindly soldiers on when it finds something wrong. Maybe it should be a config option for those who want it, and maybe Mandrake, Redhat etc can set it to assume unknown processors == i386 with no FPU, but I for one think linux's current behaviour on meeting an unknown processor is the correct default behaviour because it is the safest.
Whether this is good or bad depends on how you want your OS to work. Personally (and I will readily agree I'm probably in the minority) I want my OS to stop when it sees something it doesn't recognise happening in the hardware. I do not want it to just muddle on and hope for the best.
Remember that a broken CPU could also be a CPU that linux "doesnt understand." If you just carry on as usual if you don't know what CPU you are on and it's broken you have a much greater chance of doing damage than if you stop there and then.
But like I said, I'm probably in the minority and I think linux does the Right Thing, which is one reason why I use it. The majority probably think windows does the right thing, which is presumably why they use it. Good look to them.
Linus has played and continues to play a part in starting a revolution in computing. Whether he did that by "reimplmenting a 30 year old OS" or by having entirely new ideas or by redecorating his house, or by shaving his head, or by anything else at all is unimportant.
The undenyable fact is that the way people (including individuals and businesses) view computers and their operating systems is changing. This is due in part to the work of Linus. That makes him a revolutionary.
Thompson and Richtie are more like visionarys than revolutionaries (acciedental or otherwise) to me. (as is RMS for that matter)
Slashdot Mirror
That's a big generalisation. I think many traditional artists would be unhappy if you said that to them.
A compiler isn't really evil. It's not artistic either. It's can be an artists tool though, just like a paintbrush is.
Disagree with the telcom, and we cut your service!
What! That's outrageous! Why should the slashdot admins cut off my service just because I disagree with the telecom. I mean, I can understand the telecom cutting me of themselves, but this goes WAY too far!
:)
Windows crashes all the time when you're not overclocking so what have you got to lose? :)
Having government eskrow will not stop criminals at all. Criminals have an almost endless number of ways of communicating. If you introduce government or police snooping into a technology, the criminals will simply choose another method. They will see snooping as damage and route around it. All you will have achieved yet again is reducing the privacy of all the remaining law abiding citizens.
As for protecting children from paedophiles, all you do by decrypting their communication is scare them from that method of comminucation on to another. And even if you managed to snoop ALL their electronic communication what would that achieve? It's simple, they wouldn't communicate electronically, just how they used to before the internet.
Frankly, I am sick of hearing that its okay to invade our privacy for these sorts of reasons. It's not okay, it doesn't help in the long term.
Some people seem to have forgotten that peadophiles existed long before the nasty evil internet did. And the problem then was the same as the problem now. ie, there are some sick fucks in society. It's a social problem that desperately needs a solution. Please stop trying to solve it be technical means. It won't work.
> Will gnome 1.4 include text anti-aliasing and RGB decimation support?
Gnome 1.4 is based on gtk+ 1.2 just as Gnome 1.2 is. In other words, no. There will be no anti-aliased text support yet.
There are patches available which give aa text to gtk+ 1.2, (ie, gnome 1.2 and 1.4 will have it) but the patches seem unlikely to make it into the main tree. It seems they are not very cleanly implemented. This is because the gdk api for fonts in 1.2 is poorly suited to anything other that old fashioned x-fonts.
In the upcoming gtk+ 2.0 this is MUCH better. Pango is used for all the fonts and will of course give us the long awaited aa text. Unfortunately, source and binary compatibility is broken by gtk+ 2.0, so apps will have to be modified to use it. Gnome 2.0 will use gtk+ 2.0
... that this is almost a non-issue.
Have a look at this page (written back in July 98), which compares libc with glibc.
In particular:
"Programs compiled to use libc 5 will not run with glibc, and vice versa. However, glibc includes support for "symbol versioning". This will virtually eliminate the need for another incompatible libc switchover, like the one from libc 5 to glibc, to ever happen again."
In other words, you can have multiple versions of libc installed alongside each other and applications that use either will work. I have libc2.1 and 2.2 applications both running right now on my mandrake linux desktop.
(Am I missing something here?)
Sounds like a reasonable idea, but wouldn't usermode linux for example be better? It would give much the same results but without the virtualisation overhead. Also, it would not be restricted to x86.
So what do you say to the ppl whose boxes are exploited in the meantime?
BIND user: My box was exploited because of a buffer overflow bug that we didn't know existed.
BIND bug ppl: Ah yes, we knew about that but we didn't tell anyone in case script kids heard about it.
BIND user: Great. Now all our top secret info had been stolen and it could have been prevented. If you made the bug public then WE could have decided what was best, and possibly taken the machine(s) offline until there is a fix.
Think of it this way. If it was discovered that there was a really easy way of unlocking all existing house doors, would you want that information hiding temporarily in case criminals learned about it or would you want to know so you could at least have a chance to board up the doors if you thought it was neccesary. Making the expolit information available to all admins (regardless of whether the hax0rz also know) puts the admins in control which is the right thing to do.
Also, the problem with this stupid idea of limiting information spread is that it assumes the script kids are more on the ball than the admins. If that _is_ true, then _that_ is the problem that needs solving because in the end a poorly administered box will always be cracked however slowly or quickly you get the exploit info out.
> stopping the abuse of children in child porn
You think the individual freedom the ISPs users had in the UK is the cause of child abuse and child porn? Have you seen any statistics about reports of and detection of these crimes and how they have changed since the popularity of the internet? Do you know how these criminals operate?
Given the choices (a) and (b) that you propose, I would agree but they are not the choices we are presented with. The real choices are:
(a) Remove the rights of innocent users in case they might do something wrong in future. This will make the uninformed public feel safer whilst actually doing no good at all.
(b) Allow individual freedom to innocent citizens (unless and until they are proven guilty) This also has no effect on crime.
Why are you talking about the IRA and "criminal materials" and child porn?
In case you didn't realise, these things have been going on for a long time, since well before the internet was popular, and you haven't said one thing to suggest that the internet is making any of these problems worse. Would you know how to go about getting hold of a gun in the UK? I can tell you one thing - you wouldn't look on the internet.
I am by no means an expert, but it seems there are some bad ideas floating around here.
Firstly, this is not gtk+ becoming bloated. If it's been done in line with how gtk+ was originally written, the framebuffer support is not actually in libgtk+ but in libgdk. libgdk is a later below the widget set itself, and until now has been a fairly simple wrapper around x primitives. No doubt, gtk+ has also changed because of this but don't expect to see X specific or framebuffer specific or anything else specific code in libgtk+ itself.
Secondly, I think the article is not correct to say you can now write a gnome app. I might be wrong, but i believe gnome requires X right now which i believe is a design mistake due to lack of orthogonality. (Note: I havent looked at gnome for a long time, so I may be wrong - apologies to gnome developers if so)
Give it 15 mins or so. Linuxtoday probably WILL have a story, but it will most likely be:
"Slashdot: Apple sues freetype"
:)
Where did i mention ms?
> any window manager my grandmother has to first compile is not innately "user-friendly"
You're absoultely right. I wouldn't use any window manager your grandmother has to compile either. I don't even know how to contact her to do it, and in any case she probably wants to be doing her own compiles, not mine.
I feel sure the manufacturers of the drives will make whatever they think ppl will buy. They don't care so much about other ppls content as long as their drives sell.
We will see non-compliant drives even if this standard is widely accepted (which it won't be) just like dvd makers now seem to "forget" to strictly apply region code checks.
No we are not. We are talking about drive manufacturers and retailers. They make and sell the drives that people buy.
When was the last time you bought a MPAA hard drive?
If you are worried about your operating system refusing to work with existing drives then dont use an operating system that doesn't give you the choice.
Why would there be nothing else in the shops?
How do you thing shops decide what to stock?
How do you think manufacturers know what to make?
Answer: Whatever the customers want to buy because that's the only way they can make money.
Why is a replacement for IDE being designed now? What's wrong with SCSI? Can this do something that SCSI cannot? I recently changed over to SCSI and I couldn't be happier.
> The only people who use port scanners are script kiddies and hackers.
I used a portscanner this morning on our internal network. The problem was, we have no domain names and I had forgotten the IP of the machine i was looking for, but I know roughly which ports were open. Scanning quickly found it for me.
Okay, this was on a private network so its an entirely different matter, but it helps illustrate my point which is this: Just because SOME people (ie, you) can't think of a legitimate use for a tool and you CAN think of a bad use, doesn't mean it is a bad tool.
I would also add that (mainstream & non-techie) people are more likely to have heard of all the bad and evil things that can happen with these tools, and unlikely to have heard of legitimate uses. This is simply bacause legitimate use of what is after all an incredibly dull piece of software does not make interesting reading. Talk of hacking, cracking, e-fraud, espionage, etc. sells papers and increases page hits.
This is true.
One good solution is to have a per-site (or patter matched sites) configuration so you can allow javascript, java, even picture loading (for slow sites) etc only for the sites you choose.
Something similar to this has already been done in one of the Amiga browsers (probably ibrowse or voyager, I cant remember) and I found it useful.
... vorbis ogg?
Will the manufacturers have to pay royalties for replaying mp3? I for one would rather they used ogg and didnt' charge me the extra. If we're going to have a new standard (and hence new cd writing software to make it a smooth experiEnce) we might as well push for a patent free format also IMO.
In reality of course, mp3 is too popular to support only ogg, but including it as an option can't be that much more effort can it?
>Drivers are only available for Windows 95, 98, ME and 2000, so Linux, Macintosh, BeOS, NT 4.0 and other users are not able to use it.
This is not quite true. If you look for example at the demon.net (who use BTs hardware for the access) pages you will see that only Windows is _supported_, but drivers exist for others and you are allowed to use them.
> Other privatised industries are just as bad. Our railways are an utter shambles.
I agree with the symptoms you observe, but I think personally think it's a problem of monopoly, not of privatisation. All privatiised industries I can think of where competition exists (eg gas, electricity) are now much more efficient than previouly (but this it getting offtopic.)
> But in most other situations,
I agree, which is why I pointed out twice that I'm in the minority. All I'm saying is there are some people who don't want an operating system that blindly soldiers on when it finds something wrong. Maybe it should be a config option for those who want it, and maybe Mandrake, Redhat etc can set it to assume unknown processors == i386 with no FPU, but I for one think linux's current behaviour on meeting an unknown processor is the correct default behaviour because it is the safest.
Whether this is good or bad depends on how you want your OS to work. Personally (and I will readily agree I'm probably in the minority) I want my OS to stop when it sees something it doesn't recognise happening in the hardware. I do not want it to just muddle on and hope for the best.
Remember that a broken CPU could also be a CPU that linux "doesnt understand." If you just carry on as usual if you don't know what CPU you are on and it's broken you have a much greater chance of doing damage than if you stop there and then.
But like I said, I'm probably in the minority and I think linux does the Right Thing, which is one reason why I use it. The majority probably think windows does the right thing, which is presumably why they use it. Good look to them.
> cool patent
No.
Linus has played and continues to play a part in starting a revolution in computing. Whether he did that by "reimplmenting a 30 year old OS" or by having entirely new ideas or by redecorating his house, or by shaving his head, or by anything else at all is unimportant.
The undenyable fact is that the way people (including individuals and businesses) view computers and their operating systems is changing. This is due in part to the work of Linus. That makes him a revolutionary.
Thompson and Richtie are more like visionarys than revolutionaries (acciedental or otherwise) to me. (as is RMS for that matter)