There is an article on heise.de (german) that basically claims that one of the power plants that went down belongs to a customer of a company specialized in DCOM/RPC-based technology, which could be an indication why some security systems failed (because they were busy rebooting).
It's not too convincing, to be honest. It's just saying that there is a possible connection, and that the company running the plant didn't answer their questions yet. (Which is of course very suspicious, what could these people have better to do right now then answering to wild allegiations from a german IT magazine?)
And of course, you can do the same on Unix too. The superuser is the one with uid 0, whatever his login name is. Not to mention that changing usernames is a pretty classic example of "security by obscurity", and will only be a small hurdle for a determined attacker (but may be a big enough one for a lame automated script-kiddie attack).
So I'd say we need some better arguments if we want to make this thread a valid OS-security pissing contest;-)
Is it possible to set up a local portage and ebuild system, on non-Gentoo systems, for packages like Gnome-2.4 without having to build an entire Linux system from scratch?
Dunno about ebuild, but if it's the mechanism and not so much the actually available packages, NetBSDs pkgsrc collection (called "ports" on other BSDs) is actually cross-platform.
What happened to the Unix Philosophy? Nowadays we have all these Explorer wannabe programs that purport to do everything you want and more all in one program
Well, in the real world, where nerds are not the prodominant species, people don't care about phylosophical architectural styles. They care about getting work done, and fast.
Interestingly, in the recent KDE usability study the overintegration of Windows Explorer, especially integrating CD burning in it instead of having a separate UI for it in Windows XP, proved to be quite a problem. The "philosophical architectural style" of one tool for one job seems to match user expectations quite well usually.
Otzi reminds us that life in the alps is cold, dangerous, and just not worth it.
Nah, that was thousands of years ago. Life in the alps today is pretty safe. It's just retarded, boring, and just not worth it.
(I just have to figure out how to make that a flamebait against all the non-alps rest of bavaria too, especially Nuremberg, just so one can diss SuSE. On the other hand, outside of bavaria, mentioning that SuSE is bavarian should be sufficient. Apologies to all austrian, swiss, italian and french inhabitants of the alps who don't get the individual insults they deserve...)
(And no, I'm not that serious. I'm from the Ruhrpott, we get out share of insults, too, thank you very much. We just don't have any interesting industry left to diss...)
Good luck finding another GPLed UI library. All I know of use a more liberal license, most seem to be under the LGPL.
I do not have a moral problem with Trolltechs licensing scheme - they wrote the code, they decide how others may use it. It obviously works for them. On the other hand, the dual licensing is not ideal for me, for simple selfish reasons - if I want to write closed-sourced apps, I can get perfectly OK alternatives next door, without having to pay. And Qt is not that much better - in fact, unless you are insane enough to write GUI apps in C, I like the Gtk/Gnome API much better, the bindings generally make more sense to me than the ones of Qt. YMMV
I don't think there is any problem there, everybody is behaving fine and doing what makes most sense to them. It will be interesting to see the long-term consequences, though - my prediction is that, in a few years, Gnome will be the preferred desktop for commercial settings, with more proprietary apps available, while KDE will be more for the home-user/eye-candy-lover/hacker camp.
Recent GCC versions do have (limited) support for precompiled headers. Shouldn't that speed up Qt app builds quite a bit, or does it not work for some reason?
Sure they can. But currently they do not. Unlike certain inkjet printer manufacturers. So, if you need a printer, the best you can do right now is to buy one which doesn't require some fancy chips in the ink cartridges for no reason but getting rid of competition.
I always wondered how Graham felt about the hundreds of Bayesian filters written after he published his article. After all it was supposed to be a killer feature of a webmail system he (together with others, of course) writes to demo his Arc language.
Then again, he's probably still insanely rich from the ViaWeb (a.k.a Yahoo! Store) deal, and doesn't really have to care about lost business advantage much. Becoming a millionaire to be able to concentrate on hacking seems to be a good career plan:-)
On a related note, does anyone know what happened to YellowTab Zeta?
It's making progress. Recently, YellowTab announced features like ODBC support, USB2 and, if I remember correctly, a KHTML-based browser. As far as I know, they are in non-public beta now. You still can't actually buy Zeta from their site.
OSnews did a Review recently, and is generally a good place to get information on Zeta.
Of course. But where do you get the stable version?
Re:Typical Sun Quote
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· Score: 5, Insightful
If you take, and use open source software for commercial gains, and ensure that the actual open source versions stay one step behind you are basically stealing.
Whoa. And I thought the RIAA was insane. It is stealing if you use software in compliance with the license the authors themselves chose to publish it under?
However, lately, they are asking more what open source can do for them than what they can do for open source. Yes, this is a perfectly natural thing for a company to do, but we should hardly praise Sun for the idea of taking Linux, adding a couple of proprietary features and then using it on their workstations and desktops, so that they can get free development.
Not to mention adding a couple of free features that Linux users (and vendors) get for free. You do realize that they contribute heavily to Gnome, for example? Of course they do it in their own interest - the first version of Solaris with pre-installed Gnome was just released a week or two ago. Still, everything that is not Solaris-specific is now part of mainstream Gnome.
OpenOffice.org isn't exactly a small contribution either. Sure, they are probably quite happy about unpaid contributors that make their proprietary StarOffice better, but I'd say that this is quite a fair deal. And there are also some smaller projects, like XMLroff, an XSL FO formatter that I personally consider very promising.
So please, take your "proper attitude" elsewhere and don't talk about things you have no idea about.
Re:Typical Sun Quote
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Actually, they don't focus on any kind of "free-as-in-foo" part. They focus on the "good-as-in-reliably-solves-problems" part. Not the most stupid thing to base decisions on, and fortunatly some open source developers also consider that important, even if reading/. often suggests otherwise.
A similar issue are programmers that write unportable Linux-only code without good reason. All the world's not RedHat/x86, kids. POSIX and ANSI C are there for a reason.
Funny thing is that these are usually the same people that diss microsoft for not following open standards.
If we switch over to Linux here, we'll be doing Sun out of business, and Microsoft is unscathed. How is that good for the world?
It's not about "Us vs. Microsoft", it's about "Us vs. Proprietary Software".
Obviously, you and me are not in the same "Us".For me it's more like good software vs. bad software. If there is more choice, chances are that stuff works better - because one size doesn't fit all, and because competition is quite useful sometimes.
If Solaris dies, that is bad. There are no advantages. If it isn't what you want, be it for technical reasons or because it is proprietary, you don't have to use it, after all. Yet, a damn good OS is lost, and probably a lot of jobs for people that did some cool things. (Ever used NFS, PAM or Java on Linux? Go figure.)
Linux is really the market recognizing the commodity nature of things like the Operating System and things like Word Processing. There will always be plenty of service-related niches for things like regulatory compliance (see TurboTax reference above) and various other offerings.
There are already people working in the service-related niches. Where would the sudden increase of demand come from if every paid closed-source developer would try to enter that niche?
If more people do a certain thing for free, less people will get paid for that. It's that simple. You might think that this is inevitable, and might be right, or that this is still globally better than the current situation, but don't fool yourself thinking that a massive switch to Open Source development will not destroy a massive amout of jobs.
Not to diss rlwrap, but dude, use ILisp for SBCL! Life without hyperspec-lookup and arglist windows just isn't complete. (But don't dare to (require 'acl-repl) when you do...)
And I've used the interactive SQL mode with pleasure, although not with Oracle. Some GPLed programs are really nice, you know?;-)
(For those without a clue, I'm talking about Emacs modes)
Fankly, I would try to find someone at Sun who bothers about this. Not only are they responsible for Java, but they also care a lot about accessibility - there are many related features in Solaris and CDE, and it's one of the major areas where they contributed to Gnome, for example. (i.e. there wasn't any kind of accessibility in Gnome/Gtk before, now there is the pretty good atk, all due to them).
There may well be someone who already thought about that. And even if not, your mothers case might just be what it takes to make them think about it.
The trick is, of course, how to find the right person to contact. I don't really have a good idea about that. One approach would be to find a generic Sun accessibility person (for example on the related Gnome mailing list) that seems to be a nice guy, and politely ask them for a tip on who to contact.
Bear in mind the first web servers in the early days of the web were probably running on something of a similar CPU power to a 386.
The Web (at least the first browser, but I guess the corresponding server, too) was developed on a NeXTstation. Those were powerfull, expensive and rather user-friendly Unix workstations developed by the company Steve Jobs founded after leaving Apple. They had 68k processors with something between 20 and 40 MHz, IIRC.
There was a NeXT-feature on OSNews recently. You can even still download WorldWideWeb.app, Tim Berners-Lee's browser for the NeXT. Maybe it is even possible to compile it with GNUStep or on OS X. I don't know if it would be legal, however, the sources do not contain any license information.
A related problem may be that there really aren't any good tools for writing the documentation in the first place. Most people still use Emacs to hack DocBook, and while I'm a raving Emacs fan, its XML support is lacking and needs improvement, and a native Gnome/KDE solution surely would be a great win.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not too convincing, to be honest. It's just saying that there is a possible connection, and that the company running the plant didn't answer their questions yet. (Which is of course very suspicious, what could these people have better to do right now then answering to wild allegiations from a german IT magazine?)
So I'd say we need some better arguments if we want to make this thread a valid OS-security pissing contest ;-)
(I just have to figure out how to make that a flamebait against all the non-alps rest of bavaria too, especially Nuremberg, just so one can diss SuSE. On the other hand, outside of bavaria, mentioning that SuSE is bavarian should be sufficient. Apologies to all austrian, swiss, italian and french inhabitants of the alps who don't get the individual insults they deserve...)
(And no, I'm not that serious. I'm from the Ruhrpott, we get out share of insults, too, thank you very much. We just don't have any interesting industry left to diss...)
- GNOME Human Interface Guidelines
- KDE User Interface Guidelines
- From Apple, the Aqua Human Interface Guidelines and the pre-Aqua HIG
"The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from"...I do not have a moral problem with Trolltechs licensing scheme - they wrote the code, they decide how others may use it. It obviously works for them. On the other hand, the dual licensing is not ideal for me, for simple selfish reasons - if I want to write closed-sourced apps, I can get perfectly OK alternatives next door, without having to pay. And Qt is not that much better - in fact, unless you are insane enough to write GUI apps in C, I like the Gtk/Gnome API much better, the bindings generally make more sense to me than the ones of Qt. YMMV
I don't think there is any problem there, everybody is behaving fine and doing what makes most sense to them. It will be interesting to see the long-term consequences, though - my prediction is that, in a few years, Gnome will be the preferred desktop for commercial settings, with more proprietary apps available, while KDE will be more for the home-user/eye-candy-lover/hacker camp.
Recent GCC versions do have (limited) support for precompiled headers. Shouldn't that speed up Qt app builds quite a bit, or does it not work for some reason?
Which is one of the TODO items in the article.
Sure they can. But currently they do not. Unlike certain inkjet printer manufacturers. So, if you need a printer, the best you can do right now is to buy one which doesn't require some fancy chips in the ink cartridges for no reason but getting rid of competition.
Then again, he's probably still insanely rich from the ViaWeb (a.k.a Yahoo! Store) deal, and doesn't really have to care about lost business advantage much. Becoming a millionaire to be able to concentrate on hacking seems to be a good career plan :-)
OSnews did a Review recently, and is generally a good place to get information on Zeta.
Of course. But where do you get the stable version?
OpenOffice.org isn't exactly a small contribution either. Sure, they are probably quite happy about unpaid contributors that make their proprietary StarOffice better, but I'd say that this is quite a fair deal. And there are also some smaller projects, like XMLroff, an XSL FO formatter that I personally consider very promising.
So please, take your "proper attitude" elsewhere and don't talk about things you have no idea about.
Actually, they don't focus on any kind of "free-as-in-foo" part. They focus on the "good-as-in-reliably-solves-problems" part. Not the most stupid thing to base decisions on, and fortunatly some open source developers also consider that important, even if reading /. often suggests otherwise.
Funny thing is that these are usually the same people that diss microsoft for not following open standards.
Obviously, you and me are not in the same "Us".For me it's more like good software vs. bad software. If there is more choice, chances are that stuff works better - because one size doesn't fit all, and because competition is quite useful sometimes.
If Solaris dies, that is bad. There are no advantages. If it isn't what you want, be it for technical reasons or because it is proprietary, you don't have to use it, after all. Yet, a damn good OS is lost, and probably a lot of jobs for people that did some cool things. (Ever used NFS, PAM or Java on Linux? Go figure.)
There are already people working in the service-related niches. Where would the sudden increase of demand come from if every paid closed-source developer would try to enter that niche?
If more people do a certain thing for free, less people will get paid for that. It's that simple. You might think that this is inevitable, and might be right, or that this is still globally better than the current situation, but don't fool yourself thinking that a massive switch to Open Source development will not destroy a massive amout of jobs.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love"And I've used the interactive SQL mode with pleasure, although not with Oracle. Some GPLed programs are really nice, you know? ;-)
(For those without a clue, I'm talking about Emacs modes)
There may well be someone who already thought about that. And even if not, your mothers case might just be what it takes to make them think about it.
The trick is, of course, how to find the right person to contact. I don't really have a good idea about that. One approach would be to find a generic Sun accessibility person (for example on the related Gnome mailing list) that seems to be a nice guy, and politely ask them for a tip on who to contact.
What's more sad is that anything more free than the GPL is also not good for them.
There was a NeXT-feature on OSNews recently. You can even still download WorldWideWeb.app, Tim Berners-Lee's browser for the NeXT. Maybe it is even possible to compile it with GNUStep or on OS X. I don't know if it would be legal, however, the sources do not contain any license information.
Cool idea, but the infinite storage thingy could be tricky to implement.
The BSDs officially do not contain any Unix code or ip. We already had our asses sued, you know.
A related problem may be that there really aren't any good tools for writing the documentation in the first place. Most people still use Emacs to hack DocBook, and while I'm a raving Emacs fan, its XML support is lacking and needs improvement, and a native Gnome/KDE solution surely would be a great win.