Actually, this sound like a good idea to me. I think that it's actually better than any of their old Security Initiatives.
Having some people to actually just fix security issues is good, since then those people can concentrate on security topics.
Even if all their developers where aware of security issues, there actually has to be some group that concentrates on KNOWING about the issues, so that not only is code looked after, but actual developers have someone to ask when they think "there is potential pitfall here" but don't know the exact problem/solution.
I think Open Source security works because there is always someone that can show the actual problem with the code.
There's also the problem of big picture. While you COULD check buffers at every stage of code, you actually only need to check data that is coming INTO your code, as long as you trust your own code. Problem here is that there is often functions that SHOULD get data only after it's validated, but for some reason get it without validation. If there's someone who knows the actual validation process and data flow, and whose job is to check that all is fine, then security can be built as the first layer, not just small checks in 11001 places.
Ofcourse everyone still needs to check return values of functions that can fail (or catch exceptions when programming with a sane language).
With my Matrox G550 Quake3 runs just as fast on Linux as on Windows. The only difference is that it looks about 10 times better on Linux. Don't know why.
Take frontpage, write a document, try to read the source. Then check my webpage, read the source, compare.
Another thing is that it really depends on what one is used to. Most people think LISP is hard to read, but for someone who works a lot with LISP it's just as easy to read as Ruby.
I've seen C (mostly small fragments) code which is easiest to understand by piping it through objdump.
It's funny that we have this "BillG as Borg" logo here. After all, who's more like the Borg, we or them ?
No matter what you do, promote or fight Open Source you are giving it more publicity. Only thing we need is publicity.
Slowly, but inevitably we gain more installations, more users, and more potential contributors.
We just need to make free software as good as possible (both technically flawless and easy to use). Those that fear what MicroSoft could do to Open Source, just open your editor and start hacking. The only think that COULD beat Open Source was if everybody though "the other guys will do it for me". As long as people itch and scratch we WILL rule the world.
I doubt GNU would be this powerful if it wasn't for MicroSoft and it's model.
It at least used to include (out of the box) rpm2tgz tool, which will convert rpm's to tar.gz, which was very useful back when you didn't have the broadband to download tens of MB of source, and didn't want to wait hours for large compiles, but many magazine's only had rpm's (sometimes source-rpm's as well) on the CD included. Most of that stuff could be made to work on Slackware without any problems.
I don't know much about PowerPC architecture, but based on what I do know, I wonder if it's actually easier (faster) to do PC emulation on PowerPC than
on PC itself.
I mean, one thing is that if PowerPC has more register you can keep more virtual x86 registers in actual registers and still have some registers available for other stuff.
Also if you can break x86 instruction into simpler ones and emulate those easily with PowerPC instructions (in the same manner P6+ does internally) you might get better speed.
I'd actually be interested to know how Bochs on PC compares to Bochs on PowerPC.
Yeah, Bochs is probably not the right tool for running applications. Bochs does full emulation of the PC architechture (attempt to do at least) which is why it's so slow, but it's also why it's so useful for things like OS kernel development.
It's far more useful to get "3rd exception" message from bochs, than to see your computer reboot. Also it can give you all the values of different registers, and so on. This is where bochs is really useful.
I agree here. It seems that people have either skill or style.
Gnome graphics are decent quality, but generally fall into the category of unintrusive. I watch my desktop several hours a day, and want something that actually pleases my eye. But then again, I'm happy with wmx.
I agree here. I've been using Linux since 1995 almost exclusively at home, for security, stability and development reasons, but the older I grow, the more I think of this:
It's great that we have security. Most people won't mind security. Even Joe Sixpack seems to understand that security is generally good. Now, people are starting to get that Open Source is secure, stable, blah blah blah..
The thing with Linux (and probably BSD's though I don't have much experience there) is that most people that know what is a server, can set up a linux server. Even most of those people can keep their server relatively secure with security.debian.org and shutting down redundant stuff and such. But even many of those people are not willing to switch to Open Source on desktop.
As I see it. Linux IS decent desktop OS too. If you pre-install Gnome or KDE or pretty much anything else for someone, they will be able to use it. My girl-friend has no trouble at all with my wmx-based desktop, after about 2 minutes of briefing. But the thing is, once things get nasty on Linux desktop they often need even MORE experience with the OS than when running a server.
Once you have to touch the command-line, it can be a pain before you get used to it, but finding the relationships between the nice GUI and all the scripting and configs and stuff, is even more so.
No flames though, this is getting better all the time, I think, but the fundamental nature of UNIX as opposed to Windows seems to make UNIX easier for someone who knows what he's doing (like sysadmin or developer) while Windows is still easier for my mother, which unfortunately might have to mess with the network settings to read her mail, even if somebody assisted her by phone.
I'm currently doing a toy desktop OS with the idea of trying to combine the ease of use, even when going to system levels, with easy to develop with API, and strong security.. then again, don't hold your breath =)
It should allow you to get good quality stuff, whatever you want for 24/7, preferably directly integrating with XMMS playlist (or Winamp) and fully streaming. I'd willingly pay $20/month for that, no problem. But I am not going to buy a single CD copy-protected CD, EVER, because there's no point buying something you can't use where you want, and really can't even know if it works properly.
I know of several people that have bought copy-protected CDs and then copied mp3s from the netfor the same albums burning it themselves, just because the CD player they would have used to play the CD didn't want to play it because the stupid copy-protection.
I used to buy about 4 CDs a year or so..
Then again, if I could have fully indexed, searchable database with nice player-integration, it would be something superb, and well worth $20 or so/month, because you only want to listen to the same album so many times before you want something else. I admit I'd play it all time I was home, wasting the bandwidth, but local caches to different countries/states/regions could easily save bandwidth in case one plays the same album more than once, and in any case some albums are going to get more traffic than others..
Actually, right now I'm thinking if building such a service would be possible, and if it could be done. Thanks for a potentially good business plan;)
To be honest, I was just trying to get a more interesting response..
It's cool to be able to do things easily, I agree, and the easier it is to do something, the more choice it means for us all, which is a good thing, because it means more freedom even if you didn't know how to do it "manually".
I still think that wasting screen space is bad, though. =)
Peoples work on project for free because they like it, for fun, to learn, etc. etc. and no one complains about it.
Now, a company offers those same people the chance to make money out of this work and all you can say is that they are bad?
With me, it's like this: I can do what I'm interested in, for free, with my own timetable, but I'll be GNU.
If you want a deadline, non GNU licensing, any authority over me, a say to what I do next, or generally me to work something I don't find interesting enough to do it free, you have to pay me.
On Linux I spent about a minute doing basicly the same, except that I use keys on keyboard for that, so it consumes no space on screen.
To control XMMS on another machine, I'd need to add a part to a command line to use ssh to connect to remote shell.
xbindkeys is wonderful application;)
Really, it's cool that application like this exists, but it's really hard to find real use for one. Most of the time the easiest solution is to make a small bash script to do the job. Ofcourse fancy graphics are nice.
Still, even the GKrellM I have is mostly useless, but I use it because it combines many things into a small space, shows ethernet, cpu and memory, and provides easy way of mounting CD-ROMs, and notifies me on new mail.
Then again I'm a freak with his own personal desktop environment built of various simple tools found around the net. Still lacking a good File Manager though.
At least here in Finland you can find pretty much all net addicts with broadband in IRC 24/7 and DCC send is already a viable way of sending files fast to someone, or when you want to broadcast you drop
the file on HTTP server and send the URL to your channel of choice so people can fetch it if they want. Most people with broadband do have some extra space on an HTTP server, and real net addicts have a shell account or static IP for IRCing anyway.
Actually this sounds more like trying to bind people to single platform, enforce DRM by allowing
certain works to be broadcast to the party of 10 without allowing them to really save it.
There's really no advantage. If you are not into IRC, you can do the same with almost any Instant Messenger, be it MS or not. Even regular mailboxes tend to be large enough for a few mp3s.
I don't mean to flame MS for this, but really, I don't see any use, as existing cross-platform products are good for what it attempts to do without silly limitations.
Actually, even if I'm generally pro-OpenSource (not too pro-Linux though) I have to agree with you. MicroSoft even seems to have worked here, as with W2k it's quite easy to tell Windows to use (say) another browser or media player.
With W2k though some of MS's own apps (i think Outlook) still used IE whatever you told Windows to use. Now with XP, even explorer respects your choice.
My primary OS is Linux, but I've used XP too, and after telling it (once) to use Mozilla, I've never seen another IE window. I use the taskbar address bar, Outlook (the real one) for mail and so on.
On Linux switching from one browser to another means about 2n+1 places to change where n is the number of programs you want to know the change.
Once we have fast enough processors in small enough size, I don't really see a reason why we couldn't use serial connection. If we use normal stereo plug with signal, ground and power, why not ?
It just means that the processor inside your brain has to be able to decode the signal on the fly.
The nice things comes when we can do this bi-directionally. To see, hear, taste and feel what a computers sends you is nice, but how about when you can control the computer with your though.
Drug dealers are not going to like this though, as
it makes their chemical alternatives look inflexible and boring.
Wonder when we get MicroSoft Visual Psychedelics with DirectBrain acceleration.
This is where XP is clearly ahead of Linux with it's fast user switching. Telling my girl-friend to switch to console, start another X at first available screen is quite a lot harder than just hitting windows-L and having your processes thrown to background.
Disclaimer: I'm a Linux user since '95 and still trying to resist the temptation to switch to Windows XP. Mainly staying because I like to develop on Linux, and I like having the source. Pretty much everything else on Linux sucks, if you don't spend ours to configure it (once though, but still).
Interesting thing with MUDs seems to be that more reading they require, the less there are people that you'd rather play without. Another thing I like with MUDs is that once there is no need to get as big audience as possible, there need not be such compromises on the gameplay, which generally mean better game.
And that would be a compiled language with Ruby-style syntax and programming model.
Implementing things in Ruby is really fast, and what makes it fast are the objects and blocks. I really don't understand why so few new languages have efficient block-handling (to allow nice and easy-to-write visitor partterns and things like that).
I wrote a small application server few my website (with it's own HTTP implementation and all) initially in about 10 hours while just learning Ruby. The downside is that Ruby is a bit slow.
Well, fortunately this is free world, and I can still dream of doing a compiler for a Ruby-style language in the future.
Actually, with certain other types of music, something similar is happening.
At least here in Finland (probably elsewhere too), many people that make electric music (trance, house, breakbeat, psy-trance, "goa", and so on) just let people distribute their stuff as mp3's as much as they want. Actually, many publish their songs as mp3 on their own website.
Many of these authors have strong beliefs in freedom of expression, and think that internet enables GOOD music to be popular, instead of who happens to get a deal from a recording company.
These people play whatever they want as DJ's in underground raves, but there is something interesting in the scene: most people think that "you should buy records of artists you like to support them" even if the same people would happily give you any piece of music they have in their library.
I think this is a cool direction. Another thing that is probably going to cut record sales here is that MANY a people think that "why bother buing a (copyrighted) CD when you have to get it as mp3 from someone anyway to be able to listen to it where you want". Things might change..
Please notice that this is in Finland. I happen to live in Finland and I can tell you that they probably won't do it.
This country has strong roots in ultimate bureaucrazy, which also happens between different organisations of the government. Whether it is god or bad, I don't really know.
Nobody ever says they are afraid of what personal info the Big Blue might have. At least here in Finland, many (if not all) banks and other mission-critical companies have their mainframes located in IBM's datacenters which happen to be quite safe, which basicly means that even if whole Finland was out of electricity they probably still could use your data against you:)
Not to say that is bad. I personally trust IBM much more than my Bank but..
The 1% of legit commercial mails are often well written, and personally addressed, sent with some thought so they usually even worth checking. Most annoying thing is this 75% of spam coming with a character set your mailreader can't even display, and even if you did, you wouldn't understand a shit.
(these numbers are non-authorative estimates generated by an inperfect, proven to be buggy device called brain, if you want to get removed from this list, please surf elsewhere)
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nope, an OS, just like emacs, only prettier, and with uglier system language
Having some people to actually just fix security issues is good, since then those people can concentrate on security topics.
Even if all their developers where aware of security issues, there actually has to be some group that concentrates on KNOWING about the issues, so that not only is code looked after, but actual developers have someone to ask when they think "there is potential pitfall here" but don't know the exact problem/solution.
I think Open Source security works because there is always someone that can show the actual problem with the code.
There's also the problem of big picture. While you COULD check buffers at every stage of code, you actually only need to check data that is coming INTO your code, as long as you trust your own code. Problem here is that there is often functions that SHOULD get data only after it's validated, but for some reason get it without validation. If there's someone who knows the actual validation process and data flow, and whose job is to check that all is fine, then security can be built as the first layer, not just small checks in 11001 places.
Ofcourse everyone still needs to check return values of functions that can fail (or catch exceptions when programming with a sane language).
With my Matrox G550 Quake3 runs just as fast on Linux as on Windows. The only difference is that it looks about 10 times better on Linux. Don't know why.
Take frontpage, write a document, try to read the source. Then check my webpage, read the source, compare.
Another thing is that it really depends on what one is used to. Most people think LISP is hard to read, but for someone who works a lot with LISP it's just as easy to read as Ruby.
I've seen C (mostly small fragments) code which is easiest to understand by piping it through objdump.
No matter what you do, promote or fight Open Source you are giving it more publicity. Only thing we need is publicity.
Slowly, but inevitably we gain more installations, more users, and more potential contributors. We just need to make free software as good as possible (both technically flawless and easy to use). Those that fear what MicroSoft could do to Open Source, just open your editor and start hacking. The only think that COULD beat Open Source was if everybody though "the other guys will do it for me". As long as people itch and scratch we WILL rule the world.
I doubt GNU would be this powerful if it wasn't for MicroSoft and it's model.
You're sure the compiled version isn't easier to read after all ?
It at least used to include (out of the box) rpm2tgz tool, which will convert rpm's to tar.gz, which was very useful back when you didn't have the broadband to download tens of MB of source, and didn't want to wait hours for large compiles, but many magazine's only had rpm's (sometimes source-rpm's as well) on the CD included. Most of that stuff could be made to work on Slackware without any problems.
I mean, one thing is that if PowerPC has more register you can keep more virtual x86 registers in actual registers and still have some registers available for other stuff.
Also if you can break x86 instruction into simpler ones and emulate those easily with PowerPC instructions (in the same manner P6+ does internally) you might get better speed.
I'd actually be interested to know how Bochs on PC compares to Bochs on PowerPC.
It's far more useful to get "3rd exception" message from bochs, than to see your computer reboot. Also it can give you all the values of different registers, and so on. This is where bochs is really useful.
Gnome graphics are decent quality, but generally fall into the category of unintrusive. I watch my desktop several hours a day, and want something that actually pleases my eye. But then again, I'm happy with wmx.
It's great that we have security. Most people won't mind security. Even Joe Sixpack seems to understand that security is generally good. Now, people are starting to get that Open Source is secure, stable, blah blah blah..
The thing with Linux (and probably BSD's though I don't have much experience there) is that most people that know what is a server, can set up a linux server. Even most of those people can keep their server relatively secure with security.debian.org and shutting down redundant stuff and such. But even many of those people are not willing to switch to Open Source on desktop.
As I see it. Linux IS decent desktop OS too. If you pre-install Gnome or KDE or pretty much anything else for someone, they will be able to use it. My girl-friend has no trouble at all with my wmx-based desktop, after about 2 minutes of briefing. But the thing is, once things get nasty on Linux desktop they often need even MORE experience with the OS than when running a server.
Once you have to touch the command-line, it can be a pain before you get used to it, but finding the relationships between the nice GUI and all the scripting and configs and stuff, is even more so.
No flames though, this is getting better all the time, I think, but the fundamental nature of UNIX as opposed to Windows seems to make UNIX easier for someone who knows what he's doing (like sysadmin or developer) while Windows is still easier for my mother, which unfortunately might have to mess with the network settings to read her mail, even if somebody assisted her by phone.
I'm currently doing a toy desktop OS with the idea of trying to combine the ease of use, even when going to system levels, with easy to develop with API, and strong security.. then again, don't hold your breath =)
It should allow you to get good quality stuff, whatever you want for 24/7, preferably directly integrating with XMMS playlist (or Winamp) and fully streaming. I'd willingly pay $20/month for that, no problem. But I am not going to buy a single CD copy-protected CD, EVER, because there's no point buying something you can't use where you want, and really can't even know if it works properly.
I know of several people that have bought copy-protected CDs and then copied mp3s from the netfor the same albums burning it themselves, just because the CD player they would have used to play the CD didn't want to play it because the stupid copy-protection.
I used to buy about 4 CDs a year or so..
Then again, if I could have fully indexed, searchable database with nice player-integration, it would be something superb, and well worth $20 or so/month, because you only want to listen to the same album so many times before you want something else. I admit I'd play it all time I was home, wasting the bandwidth, but local caches to different countries/states/regions could easily save bandwidth in case one plays the same album more than once, and in any case some albums are going to get more traffic than others..
Actually, right now I'm thinking if building such a service would be possible, and if it could be done. Thanks for a potentially good business plan ;)
It's cool to be able to do things easily, I agree, and the easier it is to do something, the more choice it means for us all, which is a good thing, because it means more freedom even if you didn't know how to do it "manually".
I still think that wasting screen space is bad, though. =)
With me, it's like this: I can do what I'm interested in, for free, with my own timetable, but I'll be GNU.
If you want a deadline, non GNU licensing, any authority over me, a say to what I do next, or generally me to work something I don't find interesting enough to do it free, you have to pay me.
To control XMMS on another machine, I'd need to add a part to a command line to use ssh to connect to remote shell.
xbindkeys is wonderful application ;)
Really, it's cool that application like this exists, but it's really hard to find real use for one. Most of the time the easiest solution is to make a small bash script to do the job. Ofcourse fancy graphics are nice.
Still, even the GKrellM I have is mostly useless, but I use it because it combines many things into a small space, shows ethernet, cpu and memory, and provides easy way of mounting CD-ROMs, and notifies me on new mail.
Then again I'm a freak with his own personal desktop environment built of various simple tools found around the net. Still lacking a good File Manager though.
At least here in Finland you can find pretty much all net addicts with broadband in IRC 24/7 and DCC send is already a viable way of sending files fast to someone, or when you want to broadcast you drop the file on HTTP server and send the URL to your channel of choice so people can fetch it if they want. Most people with broadband do have some extra space on an HTTP server, and real net addicts have a shell account or static IP for IRCing anyway.
Actually this sounds more like trying to bind people to single platform, enforce DRM by allowing certain works to be broadcast to the party of 10 without allowing them to really save it.
There's really no advantage. If you are not into IRC, you can do the same with almost any Instant Messenger, be it MS or not. Even regular mailboxes tend to be large enough for a few mp3s.
I don't mean to flame MS for this, but really, I don't see any use, as existing cross-platform products are good for what it attempts to do without silly limitations.
With W2k though some of MS's own apps (i think Outlook) still used IE whatever you told Windows to use. Now with XP, even explorer respects your choice.
My primary OS is Linux, but I've used XP too, and after telling it (once) to use Mozilla, I've never seen another IE window. I use the taskbar address bar, Outlook (the real one) for mail and so on.
On Linux switching from one browser to another means about 2n+1 places to change where n is the number of programs you want to know the change.
It just means that the processor inside your brain has to be able to decode the signal on the fly.
The nice things comes when we can do this bi-directionally. To see, hear, taste and feel what a computers sends you is nice, but how about when you can control the computer with your though.
Drug dealers are not going to like this though, as it makes their chemical alternatives look inflexible and boring.
Wonder when we get MicroSoft Visual Psychedelics with DirectBrain acceleration.
Disclaimer: I'm a Linux user since '95 and still trying to resist the temptation to switch to Windows XP. Mainly staying because I like to develop on Linux, and I like having the source. Pretty much everything else on Linux sucks, if you don't spend ours to configure it (once though, but still).
Interesting thing with MUDs seems to be that more reading they require, the less there are people that you'd rather play without. Another thing I like with MUDs is that once there is no need to get as big audience as possible, there need not be such compromises on the gameplay, which generally mean better game.
Implementing things in Ruby is really fast, and what makes it fast are the objects and blocks. I really don't understand why so few new languages have efficient block-handling (to allow nice and easy-to-write visitor partterns and things like that).
I wrote a small application server few my website (with it's own HTTP implementation and all) initially in about 10 hours while just learning Ruby. The downside is that Ruby is a bit slow.
Well, fortunately this is free world, and I can still dream of doing a compiler for a Ruby-style language in the future.
At least here in Finland (probably elsewhere too), many people that make electric music (trance, house, breakbeat, psy-trance, "goa", and so on) just let people distribute their stuff as mp3's as much as they want. Actually, many publish their songs as mp3 on their own website.
Many of these authors have strong beliefs in freedom of expression, and think that internet enables GOOD music to be popular, instead of who happens to get a deal from a recording company.
These people play whatever they want as DJ's in underground raves, but there is something interesting in the scene: most people think that "you should buy records of artists you like to support them" even if the same people would happily give you any piece of music they have in their library.
I think this is a cool direction. Another thing that is probably going to cut record sales here is that MANY a people think that "why bother buing a (copyrighted) CD when you have to get it as mp3 from someone anyway to be able to listen to it where you want". Things might change..
This country has strong roots in ultimate bureaucrazy, which also happens between different organisations of the government. Whether it is god or bad, I don't really know.
Not to say that is bad. I personally trust IBM much more than my Bank but..
(these numbers are non-authorative estimates generated by an inperfect, proven to be buggy device called brain, if you want to get removed from this list, please surf elsewhere)