If there was booze and hookers in a patent office, I'd probably still be working there... . At least when I was there, it wasn't the officers being keen on granting, actually. At least the large majority wasn't. It was the bean-counters in higher management. Only a granted patent 'produces' more income in form of fees, renewal fees, and so forth. A rejected patent doesn't, except of the initial examination fee.
Do not always try to blame the poor officers. Try looking at capitalism instead. An office like the patent office ought to be financed by the tax payer, yes, the tax payer, to provide unbiased services. Services in the best interest of the country, that is the tax payer. It should not need to create its own funding, nor be used to create additional cash-flow into the coffers of the state / government. In case of the latter two, there will always be politicians in higher position to 'expedite' this cash-flow and that needs granted patents, not rejections. Plus, the applicants want patents. Look left and right, and you see many who'd be proud to have one. In our days, you might even need one or more for a position, a tenure, etc. And don't forget the courts who at times create case law that is not necessarily based on sound engineering facts. Again, the disease is not in the office, it is a societal disease of prioritizing monetary gains at all cost anywhere.
At least one chap in here who has a clue about industry, and doesn't talk about his personal relationship to his PC. Currently, +4, if I had mod points I'd dish out one for you.
And a -1 for that idiot of Mozilla. He should be sacked. He either is (an idiot), a MS-shill or some other submarine. Even on my Natty - 11.04 I got FF 5 now through the normal update path. To me that infringes on basic policies. Hell, even for a kernel-update I need apt-get dist-upgrade or manual install! - I wonder how Debian is doing? This is against all rules and tradition and must simply not happen. Don't get me wrong, the Mozilla-Foundation is totally correct at bumping up version numbers. But, and that's a very serious but, they also need to offer versions with Long Term Support. If I had to roll out 500 desktops tomorrow, I'd really think about IE, and I have hated this crap for the last 10+ years!
Does everyone from the FOSS-world get crazy these days (or submarined?). We had the Gnome-disaster and the trouble with OpenOffice (okay, that was Larry E.), now we have fragmented the non-MS-office-suite market further, and now Mozilla voluntarily ejects itself and FF out of the corporate market.
They (Mozilla) are not rich, but I am sure they have enough resources to backport to 3.6.18 or whatever we stand at, whatever security needs to be patched. We need long-term policies from anyone who wants to get us deploying her software; and I am sure Mozilla knows this. Therefore: why??
So far on submarining. If I understand it correctly. What's the term for a straightforward attack? An offensive? Like I invent something today, file tomorrow, and (with the world-wide 18 months between priority date and first publication) I take all efforts to include it into a standard, and - voila - miraculously when ISO09876 is out, it so happens that it is encumbered? This doesn't fall under the terms specified, because nobody in the world will know the invisible patent. This is not some "now we have a standard, let's make use of it and get the details patented". And John D. doesn't need to know; haha, nice income perspectives. Be the straw-man who is entitled to exemption from the need to know!
It should be as clear as the GPL: the very moment something is patented, the standard is forfeited and vice versa.
Yes, and? It should be clearly spelt out that standard != patent.
Think about the metric standard for nuts and bolts. A 120x15 is clearly defined, including the thread. And now, at this very moment, when you tender for a work to be paid by taxpayers' monies, the only way (outside of imperial countries) is to specify that all nuts and bolts have to be standard metric sizes. And miraculously, some well-connected company has some so-called intellectual property on these, so each and every nut and bolt entering the public property will pay handsomely to the owner. That's a concession to print money. Microsoft has one of those concessions, as we found out here when the Swiss Government tendered software, and prescribed that it had to be Microsoft. So nevermind who gets the tender, all royalties are by default ending up in Redmond. The very moment a tender like that is written, some pockets will fill. No, I'm wrong: metric nuts and bolts are unencumbered by patents. And that is good so.
Skype is the opposite. I hate it as much as I can hate anything non-free. But it doesn't transgress into the realms of standards. There is no H462 or ISO06990 for it. They may compete as one contender in the communications market. But MPEG, ISO, etc. are different. Specifications are laid open: and so they must be unencumbered. And not unencumbered through the backdoor, but as clearly spelt-out default.
Congratulation to a great initiative and a good effort to take at least standards out of the subject matter to be patented. This would bring huge advantages to the end-user, inclusive the latter's purse. And it would open up all standards to be beautifully implemented by Free and Open Source coders - and maybe more beautifully than by coders of proprietary software. My concern is about the legal term should have known . Not that I mind this term being applied, though once introduced it would apply to all sides. It is fine with me, if Larry E. or Steve B. are hit by this. But John D. coding Free Software in his parents basement? I have currently nothing better on offer, though I'd rather see a text that even more clearly points out that anything standardized does automagically void patent-ability. This would offer a viable alternative to the inventor: You can standardize your protocol, and be the technology leader and at the same time be sure that nobody can (mis-)appropriate it; or you decide that you want royalties for your new superb-data-exchange-protocol, which will never be standardized. I know, I know, this is not what I would would from my heart, but it could be a compromise to improve the current, miserable state pretty much.
Yes. Though my answer wasn't to the question "Can stooopid Forefront be circumvented?" The answer is 'Yes', no doubt. The question of the contribution was about 'support'. Here we don't have a non-support, we encounter a situation of actively trying to disable non-MS clients. Secondly, when we try to teach students about the beauties of FOSS, and they have to install 'strange' software - that even infringes on the university's IT policies - it is quite hard to generate followers. That was the intention of my post. On explicit demand, specific IPs of academic staff are graciously exempted from - no, not the Forefront proxy authentication - the inability to download anything directly from the Internet. Be it updates or modules for R or Latex or.deb-s. But that's not applicable to students. Only to academic staff for a personal workstation on explicit request. Therefore, yes, I consider my contribution as 'on the spot' and my answer as a one in the negative, and even more: actively preventing non-MS clients, including non-AD-authenticated MS-clients. (Though I personally have zero interest in the latter. I am not interested in MS at all.)
Contrary to a majority of posters in this discussion, in 'my' place we run a tight Windows-shop. Forefront with NTLMv2-authentication says it. No transparent proxy (except you log on as a Windows user; and even then it goes by application, not by IP, so that all applications without NTLMv2-proxy capabilities cannot connect). wget doesn't work, because Forefront downloads for you, and then offers you a click-me display when the download is finished. That means no Linux, no Debian, no Ubuntu, no... (you-name-it). We are a 'College of IT', with CS-majors. We tried to discuss this with our chaps 'at the top', but got nowhere. It was reported the person-in-charge had said "Nobody needs anything more form the Internet than browsing it with Internet Explorer". I don't tell you who 'we' are, because that might get me into trouble for badmouthing our place. But we exist. I agree, we should not exist in this form; I have been trying to promote FOSS throughout my time here, and still use it for the subjects that I teach, but it is a real bore if one has to make with this kind of mindset. I use Ubuntu-server (for reasons not discussed here) for my System Admin course; but we can't even 'apt-get update' according to official policy.
Though I have a pretty good idea what a side-channel attack is (I am a cryptographer), I can't fathom the 'intercept private key' part of the message. Eavesdropping means interception and interception means that Eve can intercept the private key as sent. There is, however, no reason to send the private key, ever. So the term 'intercept the private key' sounds suspicious. Like in the Bernstein Attack (google for it, I'm too lazy to offer a link), a symmetric key (AES) can be reconstituted from the timing sequence, which is a typical side-channel attack. Though without the spy-programme, no chance. I am not trying to say the original document was crap, though I am not sure it has been interpreted correctly. [10 minutes later] I read the original paper and I'm vindicated: No transfer of the private key, no interception. Over. The attack is on factorization sequences of the original message which - depending on the circumstances - allows for regeneration of the original key. Which is vastly different from the term 'interception'.
At least I can agree on this! The desktop has been dumbed down. To me, the first time, seriously, by RedHat, from 7.3 to 8, when many a good thing disappeared, like workspaces. I complained as loud as I could, but was told, "nobody uses them". 10 years later, they are resurrected by activities. May I was just wrong, having seen no remote X for years, and me myself preferring vncviewer, I thought transparent client-server for X was outdated. I stand corrected.
And take care about compiz, KDE and Gnome 3 and Unity are also taking away some of its features. Gnome 2 is still my preferred Compiz-desktop, while KDE has become my preferred one for working, of course composited.
Ooops, Insightful 3? You are theoretical right with the network transparency of X. Though your post implies that you need X for network transparency; like remote desktops. Nothing could be further from the truth. I see a lot of installations over the year, but nobody uses X for this purpose any longer. Nobody. It has even been disabled one way or another over the years, for security purposes. All sorts of your desktop viewers like vncviewer have nothing to make with the native network transparency of X.
You guys don't seem to grok it: There is no more Gnome 2 available, except in maintenance and soon to be deprecated to be followed by abandoned. You had better proposed Aubuntu; for 'Abandonware Ubuntu'! And the same applies for Slackware, Gentoo, you name them. Sooner or later everyone will have to decide on either of: Gnome 3, Unity, KDE as default desktop environment.
A community effort now starts to challenge this by shipping the so-called UBB board, which plugs into the micro-SD port, making 6 I/O lines available to hardware hackers. The most impressive use so far is this VGA port implemented by just a few resistors, with signal-generation mostly controlled by software. The guy who did this calls it an 'unexpected capability.' Schematics and source code are available under the GPL."
Open Hardware; not the Open Software, is relevant in this project.
I seriously tried to contribute something useful to an earlier thread, no chance. Then I was looking for some politically incorrect snide remark about ex-convicts, no chance.
Here comes my serious take, then: I read TFA, and what I can read into it, with only some interpretation, is that when you buy/install OSX or Linux, you can do so only, when there is a cross-platform AV. If your Windows Anti-Virus also finds the viruses in OSX/Linux.
For Christ's sake, the question here isn't if OSX/Linux need AV or not. No, greenfruitsalad (http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2119134&cid=35997984), your arguments all don't apply. The hare-brained part of the thing is that OSX/Linux - if they have or can have viruses - will have altogether other exploits than Windows. Where comes the 'cross-platform' into the perspective? I can't see it. The AV-definition for a MTA is cross-platform already (trying to stop any sorts of malware from entering users' mailboxes), to give an example. *-listing is platform-independent as well.
So what was it, that these people are actually asking?? I don't get it.
As I wrote, they have been taken from me since 2003 or so. Actually, I could without, but there was a number of other restrictions, that don't matter as of today any longer. I used workspaces very much as kind of early precursors to what KDE offers as 'activities' these days. At least, that's what I was trying in those days.
Sawfish was ridiculously slow, being pointlessly built around a scheme interpreter, so it had to go.
I did notice a few features that temporarily went missing in the transition, but mainly I just noticed that the GUI was no longer horribly slow. The missing features came back.
Obviously, you don't have users in mind when you write words like this. Because when users like something, you simply can't take it away. And metacity took almost all that I could do with sawfish. Like workspaces. I was told on the mailing list (too lazy to find it), that 'nobody uses workspaces' and so desktops were just enough. To give an example. Too lazy to find more. You argue like a misguided developer. If sawfish was too slow, and scheme is not exactly what you want to base UIs on (I agree), the task is to rewrite the concept in a more adequate manner, not bring in the second choice. And I wasn't alone, by all means, many felt unhappy about the first wave of severely restricted choices by then. No good. Over.
Not so fast, mate! There are those where some parts of the body (right?) are a bad indication of what to expect several inches further up (or down). Make it 2x25x25 for the better.
Look back to the GNOME that shipped with Red Hat 7 through Red Hat 9. It was free of distracting crap.
Interesting, but you must have gotten the numbers wrong. Because exactly there in between is where Gnome broke for the first time: from sawfish to metacity. I was totally happy with sawfish on 7.3, and suddenly with RedHat 8 there was a pre-set interface that knew much better what I wanted from a GUI. Or just not.
That's your opinion and your way of working. Mine is partially the opposite: I don't want 'Start'-buttons, I don't want panels, I don't want borders. I want naked full screen stuff. With a bit of tweaking KDE does this for me, and I have yet to find a lighter alternative (which I would prefer!). So I change between (running) applications with a mouse-over-edge, and start new applications and see the time, status, notifications, launchers, on a 2-D 'panel' called 'Dashboard' that I call with a mouse-over-edge. That is all fine for me, and all that I want. Gnome 3 neither Unity do this for me, so they are DOA.
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If there was booze and hookers in a patent office, I'd probably still be working there ... .
At least when I was there, it wasn't the officers being keen on granting, actually. At least the large majority wasn't. It was the bean-counters in higher management. Only a granted patent 'produces' more income in form of fees, renewal fees, and so forth. A rejected patent doesn't, except of the initial examination fee.
Do not always try to blame the poor officers. Try looking at capitalism instead. An office like the patent office ought to be financed by the tax payer, yes, the tax payer, to provide unbiased services. Services in the best interest of the country, that is the tax payer. It should not need to create its own funding, nor be used to create additional cash-flow into the coffers of the state / government.
In case of the latter two, there will always be politicians in higher position to 'expedite' this cash-flow and that needs granted patents, not rejections.
Plus, the applicants want patents. Look left and right, and you see many who'd be proud to have one. In our days, you might even need one or more for a position, a tenure, etc. And don't forget the courts who at times create case law that is not necessarily based on sound engineering facts.
Again, the disease is not in the office, it is a societal disease of prioritizing monetary gains at all cost anywhere.
At least one chap in here who has a clue about industry, and doesn't talk about his personal relationship to his PC.
Currently, +4, if I had mod points I'd dish out one for you.
And a -1 for that idiot of Mozilla. He should be sacked. He either is (an idiot), a MS-shill or some other submarine.
Even on my Natty - 11.04 I got FF 5 now through the normal update path. To me that infringes on basic policies. Hell, even for a kernel-update I need apt-get dist-upgrade or manual install! - I wonder how Debian is doing? This is against all rules and tradition and must simply not happen. Don't get me wrong, the Mozilla-Foundation is totally correct at bumping up version numbers. But, and that's a very serious but, they also need to offer versions with Long Term Support. If I had to roll out 500 desktops tomorrow, I'd really think about IE, and I have hated this crap for the last 10+ years!
Does everyone from the FOSS-world get crazy these days (or submarined?). We had the Gnome-disaster and the trouble with OpenOffice (okay, that was Larry E.), now we have fragmented the non-MS-office-suite market further, and now Mozilla voluntarily ejects itself and FF out of the corporate market.
They (Mozilla) are not rich, but I am sure they have enough resources to backport to 3.6.18 or whatever we stand at, whatever security needs to be patched. We need long-term policies from anyone who wants to get us deploying her software; and I am sure Mozilla knows this. Therefore: why??
So far on submarining. If I understand it correctly. What's the term for a straightforward attack? An offensive? Like I invent something today, file tomorrow, and (with the world-wide 18 months between priority date and first publication) I take all efforts to include it into a standard, and - voila - miraculously when ISO09876 is out, it so happens that it is encumbered?
This doesn't fall under the terms specified, because nobody in the world will know the invisible patent. This is not some "now we have a standard, let's make use of it and get the details patented".
And John D. doesn't need to know; haha, nice income perspectives. Be the straw-man who is entitled to exemption from the need to know!
It should be as clear as the GPL: the very moment something is patented, the standard is forfeited and vice versa.
Yes, and?
It should be clearly spelt out that standard != patent.
Think about the metric standard for nuts and bolts. A 120x15 is clearly defined, including the thread. And now, at this very moment, when you tender for a work to be paid by taxpayers' monies, the only way (outside of imperial countries) is to specify that all nuts and bolts have to be standard metric sizes. And miraculously, some well-connected company has some so-called intellectual property on these, so each and every nut and bolt entering the public property will pay handsomely to the owner. That's a concession to print money. Microsoft has one of those concessions, as we found out here when the Swiss Government tendered software, and prescribed that it had to be Microsoft. So nevermind who gets the tender, all royalties are by default ending up in Redmond. The very moment a tender like that is written, some pockets will fill.
No, I'm wrong: metric nuts and bolts are unencumbered by patents. And that is good so.
Skype is the opposite. I hate it as much as I can hate anything non-free. But it doesn't transgress into the realms of standards. There is no H462 or ISO06990 for it. They may compete as one contender in the communications market. But MPEG, ISO, etc. are different. Specifications are laid open: and so they must be unencumbered. And not unencumbered through the backdoor, but as clearly spelt-out default.
Congratulation to a great initiative and a good effort to take at least standards out of the subject matter to be patented.
This would bring huge advantages to the end-user, inclusive the latter's purse.
And it would open up all standards to be beautifully implemented by Free and Open Source coders - and maybe more beautifully than by coders of proprietary software.
My concern is about the legal term should have known . Not that I mind this term being applied, though once introduced it would apply to all sides. It is fine with me, if Larry E. or Steve B. are hit by this. But John D. coding Free Software in his parents basement? I have currently nothing better on offer, though I'd rather see a text that even more clearly points out that anything standardized does automagically void patent-ability. This would offer a viable alternative to the inventor: You can standardize your protocol, and be the technology leader and at the same time be sure that nobody can (mis-)appropriate it; or you decide that you want royalties for your new superb-data-exchange-protocol, which will never be standardized.
I know, I know, this is not what I would would from my heart, but it could be a compromise to improve the current, miserable state pretty much.
Yes. Though my answer wasn't to the question "Can stooopid Forefront be circumvented?" The answer is 'Yes', no doubt. .deb-s. But that's not applicable to students. Only to academic staff for a personal workstation on explicit request.
The question of the contribution was about 'support'. Here we don't have a non-support, we encounter a situation of actively trying to disable non-MS clients.
Secondly, when we try to teach students about the beauties of FOSS, and they have to install 'strange' software - that even infringes on the university's IT policies - it is quite hard to generate followers.
That was the intention of my post. On explicit demand, specific IPs of academic staff are graciously exempted from - no, not the Forefront proxy authentication - the inability to download anything directly from the Internet. Be it updates or modules for R or Latex or
Therefore, yes, I consider my contribution as 'on the spot' and my answer as a one in the negative, and even more: actively preventing non-MS clients, including non-AD-authenticated MS-clients. (Though I personally have zero interest in the latter. I am not interested in MS at all.)
Contrary to a majority of posters in this discussion, in 'my' place we run a tight Windows-shop. Forefront with NTLMv2-authentication says it. No transparent proxy (except you log on as a Windows user; and even then it goes by application, not by IP, so that all applications without NTLMv2-proxy capabilities cannot connect). ... (you-name-it).
wget doesn't work, because Forefront downloads for you, and then offers you a click-me display when the download is finished. That means no Linux, no Debian, no Ubuntu, no
We are a 'College of IT', with CS-majors. We tried to discuss this with our chaps 'at the top', but got nowhere. It was reported the person-in-charge had said "Nobody needs anything more form the Internet than browsing it with Internet Explorer".
I don't tell you who 'we' are, because that might get me into trouble for badmouthing our place. But we exist. I agree, we should not exist in this form; I have been trying to promote FOSS throughout my time here, and still use it for the subjects that I teach, but it is a real bore if one has to make with this kind of mindset. I use Ubuntu-server (for reasons not discussed here) for my System Admin course; but we can't even 'apt-get update' according to official policy.
Okay, you laugh for me, I cry.
welcome to the club!
Though I have a pretty good idea what a side-channel attack is (I am a cryptographer), I can't fathom the 'intercept private key' part of the message. Eavesdropping means interception and interception means that Eve can intercept the private key as sent. There is, however, no reason to send the private key, ever. So the term 'intercept the private key' sounds suspicious.
Like in the Bernstein Attack (google for it, I'm too lazy to offer a link), a symmetric key (AES) can be reconstituted from the timing sequence, which is a typical side-channel attack. Though without the spy-programme, no chance.
I am not trying to say the original document was crap, though I am not sure it has been interpreted correctly.
[10 minutes later]
I read the original paper and I'm vindicated: No transfer of the private key, no interception. Over.
The attack is on factorization sequences of the original message which - depending on the circumstances - allows for regeneration of the original key. Which is vastly different from the term 'interception'.
At least I can agree on this!
The desktop has been dumbed down. To me, the first time, seriously, by RedHat, from 7.3 to 8, when many a good thing disappeared, like workspaces. I complained as loud as I could, but was told, "nobody uses them". 10 years later, they are resurrected by activities.
May I was just wrong, having seen no remote X for years, and me myself preferring vncviewer, I thought transparent client-server for X was outdated.
I stand corrected.
And take care about compiz, KDE and Gnome 3 and Unity are also taking away some of its features. Gnome 2 is still my preferred Compiz-desktop, while KDE has become my preferred one for working, of course composited.
Ooops, Insightful 3?
You are theoretical right with the network transparency of X. Though your post implies that you need X for network transparency; like remote desktops. Nothing could be further from the truth. I see a lot of installations over the year, but nobody uses X for this purpose any longer. Nobody. It has even been disabled one way or another over the years, for security purposes.
All sorts of your desktop viewers like vncviewer have nothing to make with the native network transparency of X.
You guys don't seem to grok it:
There is no more Gnome 2 available, except in maintenance and soon to be deprecated to be followed by abandoned. You had better proposed Aubuntu; for 'Abandonware Ubuntu'!
And the same applies for Slackware, Gentoo, you name them. Sooner or later everyone will have to decide on either of: Gnome 3, Unity, KDE as default desktop environment.
A community effort now starts to challenge this by shipping the so-called UBB board, which plugs into the micro-SD port, making 6 I/O lines available to hardware hackers. The most impressive use so far is this VGA port implemented by just a few resistors, with signal-generation mostly controlled by software. The guy who did this calls it an 'unexpected capability.' Schematics and source code are available under the GPL."
Open Hardware; not the Open Software, is relevant in this project.
I seriously tried to contribute something useful to an earlier thread, no chance.
Then I was looking for some politically incorrect snide remark about ex-convicts, no chance.
Here comes my serious take, then: I read TFA, and what I can read into it, with only some interpretation, is that when you buy/install OSX or Linux, you can do so only, when there is a cross-platform AV. If your Windows Anti-Virus also finds the viruses in OSX/Linux.
For Christ's sake, the question here isn't if OSX/Linux need AV or not. No, greenfruitsalad (http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2119134&cid=35997984), your arguments all don't apply.
The hare-brained part of the thing is that OSX/Linux - if they have or can have viruses - will have altogether other exploits than Windows. Where comes the 'cross-platform' into the perspective? I can't see it. The AV-definition for a MTA is cross-platform already (trying to stop any sorts of malware from entering users' mailboxes), to give an example. *-listing is platform-independent as well.
So what was it, that these people are actually asking?? I don't get it.
Looks like Osama Bin Laden was following this advice ...
Deckchairs most often stand in the rear part of the ship ... can they expect anything from behind??
As I wrote, they have been taken from me since 2003 or so. Actually, I could without, but there was a number of other restrictions, that don't matter as of today any longer.
I used workspaces very much as kind of early precursors to what KDE offers as 'activities' these days. At least, that's what I was trying in those days.
Sawfish was ridiculously slow, being pointlessly built around a scheme interpreter, so it had to go.
I did notice a few features that temporarily went missing in the transition, but mainly I just noticed that the GUI was no longer horribly slow. The missing features came back.
Obviously, you don't have users in mind when you write words like this. Because when users like something, you simply can't take it away. And metacity took almost all that I could do with sawfish. Like workspaces. I was told on the mailing list (too lazy to find it), that 'nobody uses workspaces' and so desktops were just enough. To give an example. Too lazy to find more.
You argue like a misguided developer. If sawfish was too slow, and scheme is not exactly what you want to base UIs on (I agree), the task is to rewrite the concept in a more adequate manner, not bring in the second choice. And I wasn't alone, by all means, many felt unhappy about the first wave of severely restricted choices by then. No good. Over.
ternary logic
Not so fast, mate! There are those where some parts of the body (right?) are a bad indication of what to expect several inches further up (or down).
Make it 2x25x25 for the better.
For me, the lack of a good grammar checker is a serious issue.
Fully agree! That's why I wouldn't spend a fiver for Microsoft Office. OpenOffice also cannot, but at least it cannot for free.
Just grab some Xubuntu or Kubuntu and you can have Gnome again. :)
One of the best things about open source is the freedom to use alternatives
Pretty unhelpful advice, because Gnome 2 is deprecated and not developed any further, and Gnome 3 is plain turd. At least as of today.
Look back to the GNOME that shipped with Red Hat 7 through Red Hat 9. It was free of distracting crap.
Interesting, but you must have gotten the numbers wrong. Because exactly there in between is where Gnome broke for the first time: from sawfish to metacity. I was totally happy with sawfish on 7.3, and suddenly with RedHat 8 there was a pre-set interface that knew much better what I wanted from a GUI. Or just not.
That's your opinion and your way of working. Mine is partially the opposite: I don't want 'Start'-buttons, I don't want panels, I don't want borders. I want naked full screen stuff. With a bit of tweaking KDE does this for me, and I have yet to find a lighter alternative (which I would prefer!).
So I change between (running) applications with a mouse-over-edge, and start new applications and see the time, status, notifications, launchers, on a 2-D 'panel' called 'Dashboard' that I call with a mouse-over-edge. That is all fine for me, and all that I want. Gnome 3 neither Unity do this for me, so they are DOA.
Did it come with a pipe for you?