On Linux, some folks set up loopback encrypted filesystems. A loopback encrypted filesystem cannot be accessed by simply taking a hard drive.
If you can get repeated undected physical access to the machine, you can probably eventually trojan your way to root, though it might involve things as intricate as trojaning the bootloader and whatever utility you're using to decrypt the filesystem.
Are any among us innocent of wanting our 15 minutes?
The problem is that software companies do damned little to reward people that do a good job of turning up and reporting bugs properly. Frankly, if he releases before Apple, then he gets to be quoted all over the place, including mainstream media. He might get to be interviewed. If he instead sits on the problem and waits and he's lucky, he might get a brief note at the bottom of the advisory.
Microsoft and Apple should lay in a big store of T-shirts and mugs, and put a "special thanks" section somewhere in their OS to people that report crucial security holes but don't run out and release them to the public if they don't want a public release. It costs them *far*, *far* less to hand out a "MacGuardian" or somesuch T-shirt and mug and add a mention than it does to deal with the aftermath of a publically available remote root exploit without a fix. Actually, I would have given him a free pass to the next MacWorld or whatnot convention. Have incentives to favor the outcome you want, not discourage it.
On the other hand, Linux is pretty much always full disclosure, since describing problems generally happens in public forums anyway...
"Smitty"...damn, that sounds familiar from the far, far reaches of memory. Google doesn't turn anything up, but did you do an interview with a journalist as a security expert years ago in which you discussed packet sniffing on the Macintosh?
It's not such a problem in mathematics (AFAIK), where definitions tend to be a bit more rigorous, but a tremendous number of philosophical problems can be boiled down to incomplete or incorrect definitions.
I've only run into Qt lightly, and while I've worked on a number of GTK apps and used glade, have never done more than tiny apps purely from scratch. However, here's an attempt at some comparisons:
* Qt has good C++ bindings. Better than GTK, though GTK does have gtkmm.
* I'm not sure whether it's possible to do Qt in C. If so, it would be quite ugly. If you are otherwise entirely neutral as to choice of toolkit and desktop, C fans (traditional UNIX folk) are probably going to prefer GTK, and C++ fans (generally Windows folk) are going to prefer Qt.
* GTK is more widely used and supports more languages outside of C and C++. There are no Qt ocaml bindings, for instance.
* GTK uses less memory and is faster.
* Currently (and according to Qt/KDE developers, due to linker deficiencies), Qt apps launch more slowly than do GTK apps (both toolkits do too damn much init-time processing IMHO).
* There are tearable panes in either KDE or Qt...not sure which. This is a very nice feature that GTK does not do.
* GTK allows (though with GTK 2, a config file option must be enabled) the user to easily rebind key combinations associated with a menu choice. Qt does not do this.
* Qt currently has good support for small framebuffer-based devices. I do not believe that there is as much work on GTK for this (though GTK can go through the framebuffer instead of X).
* Qt is "commercially supported", FWIW.
* GTK is currently more widely used.
* Qt provides more *things* than GTK does (Note: this is based on my experiences, which are biased towards GTK 1 instead of 2). I suspect that you could write an app entirely within Qt -- GTK is designed to supplement the existing UNIX APIs.
* If you're into the ideology, the FSF/GNU people have tended towards supporting GNOME rather than KDE.
* Qt has been around for longer than GTK has.
* Qt widget engines support fading menus. I do not believe that this is currently the case for GTK.
* You may prefer using various apps associated with either GTK or Qt. Features aside, I find that Konqueror feels more like a "native" app to its widget set than does Galeon, but on the other hand, GTK has GIMP and a number of other programs that I use.
* No matter which you use, either API is modern, and light years ahead of Win32 or the Macintosh Toolbox. Programmers who have worked with these in the past are in for a big, big treat. It's *much* easier and faster to write code for common cases, and a lot of neat debugging code is present.
* Qt is better documented. The core GTK functionality is well documented, but some more esoteric GTK or GNOME related libraries have very little documentation.
* GTK's license is LGPL -- frankly, this license is much more generous and gives a good deal mroe freedom than Qt's license, which is GPL at best and commercial (and costs $$$) at worst. Since the core widget set for a platform is a pretty crucial element from a licensing perspective, it's awfully rough to try to force every GUI developer to use a particular license or pay a license fee.
* Both have RAD GUI design tools. I'm unfamiliar with Qt's. GTK's is called glade -- it has a rather awkward interface, but works reasonably well, and has plugins to export to a number of the GTK-supported languages.
* (A bit of a digression) GTK uses glib. Glib is really, really, really cool. Any C programmer out there will *drool* at the idea of having glib's functionality available to their programmers, even if they like Qt (as a matter of fact, KDE now uses glib, IIRC). Not a huge deal for C++, but glib provides some functionality that C could really use, when aimed at application development.
I'm going to digress a bit from Qt/GTK to KDE/GNOME, since your choice of widget set also affects your desktop environment.
In general, from a user perspective, I've found that GTK/GNOME apps tend to be a bit more oriented towards the hacker, and Qt/KDE apps tow
Technically, those are window manager features. You could even use sawfish with KDE.
Frankly, I'm with you 100% on sawfish. Sawfish is a *fantastic* window manager for folks that aren't dead-set on being lightweight (a la fvwm/twm), aren't hyper-hardcore keyboard-only nuts (ion), aren't eye candy freaks (Enlightenment), and don't require an extremely simplistic window manager (kwm, metacity). If you like emacs and use X, you'll feel right at home with sawfish. Good usability.
Main drawbacks -- doesn't come with a pager, and you have to get one separately. There's a basic config utility which still gives more power than most window managers, but to really make the thing do tricks, you'll want to be comfortable with LISP -- emacs fans should be happy.
Let's see...on other feedback, I would suggest using xbindkeys to launch your external programs, rather than sawfish. As a matter of fact, every program I have running in my X environment is launched from xbindkeys or from a decendant of one of those programs. This has a number of benefits -- xbindkeys is desktop environment independent, allowed me to avoid rare and irritating problems where sawfish would ignore a "launch xterm" command and then when a second "launch xterm" command is sent, launch two, and xbindkeys is somewhat faster -- when I hit Windows-T, I want a terminal *now*.:-)
There are a *ton* of filemanagers for GNOME, but nothing as IEish as Konq and Nautilus -- i.e. overarching meta-application. Lots of lightweights.
If you search for "file manager" and gtk or gnome on Freshmeat, you'll get a number of hits.
If you want something quite lightweight and fast (i.e. you're running a sub-300 Mhz box), using ROX Filer is a neat choice. On the rare occasions when I prefer a GUI utility to bash for file management (usually when working with a set of files with foreign names), Rox has worked nicely.
I think Gnome's widgets are still terribly legacy-driven
Okay, I agree that KDE beats GNOME on:
* Making toolbars always hideable (though this isn't exactly "advanced") * Tearable panes
However, GNOME beats KDE on:
* Tearable menus
* User rebindable accelerators for menus (KDE has a systemwide version of this, but it's far less powerful).
Both of them lack a couple of advancements that I'd like to see, like trying out pie menus, having a DOCUMENT_UNSAVED window manager hint a la Mac OS and NeXTStep, having a GUI environment for hooking up scripts to sending menu-item/button-clicked signals, a WINDOID window type with the window manager (to do tool palettes a la Mac OS) and a system for working with the window manager to group windows (all GIMP windows together, so that if the user wants he can have WINDOIDs come to the front when raising a window in a group).
KDE's DCOP is nice but not friendly enough and underused. GNOME needs a user-accessable way to send messages to apps.
KDE's system bar sucks in terms of flexibility. Frankly, GNOME 2's system bar ain't as great as GNOME 1's.
Both of the two are bloated compared to most other Linux software, and suck far more RAM and CPU cycles than is necessary.
Oh, and there's no window manager hints for PROCESSING and ERROR states, both of which could be terribly useful once WM authors get their hands on them.
The commercially-backed KDE developers may go away, but Linux software has always lived and died on the strength of volunteers. GNOME may become more dominant, but KDE will always be there.
Yes, God forbid that a company that produces classy software like Qt should ever make any money whatsoever from it.
I don't think anyone said that nobody should be able to make money from classy software. Red Hat makes money and yet you can download ISOs, so there's something going on there.
Frankly, I think TrollTech should have (back in the day) made Qt, handed it out under the LGPL, and then sold a good set of Qt development tools, and tried to get adoped by folks porting commercial software to Linux. There would never have *been* a GNOME, since the license wouldn't have been an issue. It'd be a little harder to make money, yes, though I think they could have made it. They wanted to go for a bigger gamle, though -- commercial control of a major Linux library. There is *tremendous* resistance in the Linux developer community to becoming beholden to any one company. They really didn't want Qt to become another Motif. You don't want the OS that you work on, that is built almost entirely of volunteer-built software, to have as a fundamental component, a non-free set of libraries that all "standard" GUI apps use. And so, I think that the GNOME movement was reasonable, well-founded, and justified. They were not stopping folks from using Qt -- people just said that they wanted to donate time and effort to providing an alternative.
TrollTech held out for a long time -- perhaps long enough to kill their opportunity. Their licensing system is *still* not as free as GTK's, and I think that they will have a tough battle if they attempt to regain their position -- there is currently a significantly larger developer mass behind GNOME, even aside from Linux distributors tending towards GNOME. The only major advantage that they had was early maturity and stability -- and GTK can pretty much go toe to toe with KDE these days.
I can't figure out what you dislike about GTK, frankly. You may prefer C++ to C. That's particularly legitimate if you're an experienced Windows high-level programmer, where C++ and MFC has long been standard. However, GTK is a *very nicely* (IMHO, of course) built example of how to do OOP well in C. It is faster and more modular than Qt, and provides a number of significant features (such as built-in runtime user-level key rebinding) that Qt has not kept pace with.
A number of Qt design decisions were quite reasonable at the time of its production, but are now rather unfortunate in the presence of more solid C++ compilers. Qt contains its own string class, and reimplementation of a good deal of STL functionality. If Qt were being built today, it's doubtable whether these decisions would go the same way.
That being said, choice is nice, and in the end, it's probably a good thing to have two desktops -- if the maintainers of one project don't like your idea, get it tried out on the other desktop. If it works well, the other folks should accept it, and everyone wins.
I liked Matrix Revolutions. (well, pieces...the slow-fast jerky pacing of if it is a bit odd).
On the other hand, I didn't hink that the original Matrix was particularly philosophically interesting -- there's nothing particularly new it in, just things being repackaged for a mass audience. So it came down to special effects and action scenes for me, and both Matrix and Matrix Revolutions had plenty.
Look, here you have this Ring, this totally evil, corrupting, terrible power, and you go to great lengths to make sure the audience knows about it and that even hobbits can't resist its effects forever (Bilbo). Then along comes this Man, Faramir, brother of corruptible Boromir, whose weakness led to his own death even. Faramir says "Nah, fuck it, I wouldn't even pick it up if it were lying there on the ground"
The Ring is addictive. Gandalf and Galadriel also chose not to take it, as did all the folks at the meeting in Rivendel. It's just simply an appealing object (expensive-looking ring, grants amazing powers), and only can really exert nastiness after it's been in someone's posession for a while. (Possible exception -- Smeagol, but he was a nasty character to begin with.)
probably not. mainly due to the cutting that has happened already. like the loss of the resolution to the sauruman plot.
Oh, get real. This is the Lord of the Rings. You realize how much cutting had to happen to get this into any kind of a movie form, *period*? The whole thing'd be something like twenty movies if it were complete.
That being said, I was pretty adverse to the idea of modification to the story and went in to see Fellowship with a pretty bad attitude, and discovered that the movies really are terribly good.
If you want the extended versions, then *buy* the extended versions.
The term is correct -- see here for details. Within the realms of science, a law is specifically a generalization that may be made based *on observation*. Moore was making a generalization based on past observation. He was not making a theoretical claim about the future. All this is quite proper for a law. As a matter of fact, if he was hypothesizing that processor speeds will stop doubling in the next twenty years, that would be a hypothesis, since it's not a generalization based on a body of observation.
Also, WRT your mention of a mathematician -- mathematicians are not scientists -- they are in a class of their own, along with logicians and many computer "scientists". This group works with absolutes, with provable concepts. Scientists do not do this. Science is a system designed to deal with observation and produce effective models of observed things.
URIs don't provide content-based addressing (like a hash of the document). They rely upon trustworthy name registrars, which is an assumption that might have been valid when Berners-Lee was doing his early work, but is not now. They rely on someone willing to continue hosting the original document -- not necessarily the case.
You can link to a article which is then changed by the original publisher (or someone else). With scientific papers, you can't do that -- and such behavior is probably not desireable.
On the up side, if you're currently using cited references, you should be able to build such a system without too much problem -- follow links to PDFs or automatically crawl HTML documents (and check images) and serve all papers that you refer to with your paper. It'd be big, but it provides better reliability than do current paper schemes.
Another feature that might be useful is signing of the content (assuming RSA doesn't get broken in the future).
Basically, if you put up a SHA-1 (Gnutella), MD4 (eDonkey), or similar reference, you can host the original referred-to documents as well as the original host.
If Freenet didn't have as a specific drawback the inability of someone to guarantee that a document remains hosted as long as they are willing to host it, Freenet would be a good choice for this.
One possibility is that, with a bit of manual work, one can frequently find an academic work by Googling for its title. At least for now, as long as you host the original papers as well, Google should pick up on this fact. Of course, it does nothing to prevent modification of that paper by another party...
A good system for handling this would be to have a known system that is willing to archive, in perpetuity (probably hosted by the US government or other reasonably stable, trustworthy source [yes, yes, cracks at the US government aside]). This system would act like a Tier 1 NTP server -- it would only grant access to a number of other trusted servers (universities, etc) that mirror it -- perhaps university systems -- which would keep load sane. These servers (or perhaps Tier 3 servers) then provide public access. Questions of whether there would be a hard policy of never removing content or what would be allowed (especially WRT politically controversial content) would have to be answered.
There could be multiple Tier 1 servers that would sync up with each other, and could act as checks in case one server is broken into. I'm partial to the idea of including a signature on each file, but I suppose it isn't really necessary.
Specific formats could be required to ensure that these papers are readable for all time. Project Gutenberg went with straight ASCII. This would probably have to be slightly more elaborate. Microsoft Word and PDF might not be good choices, and international support would be necessary.
It's a small part of your point but an important detail to get straight -- that is an extremely, extremely sanitized description.
Mmmff. I'd like to add comment on your answer, as well.
The "Final Solution" plan to kill every last Jew on the planet was established in 1941 and specialized SS and SA killing units were following German troops in Eastern Europe that year.
While I'm sure you'd consider it a technicality, Jew within the bounds of the new German-held lands. I don't believe that there'd be an attempt force something like this on, say, Britain. The Einsatzgruppen that you speak of were certainly killing Jews in 1941, but the inital reason they were ordered out was to control newly occupied areas and prevent partisan activity. Jews were just mixed in with a list of politically dangerous people, including Soviet political officials and the like.
But the comprehensive extermination of Jews by the Nazis isn't something that "began", it was a significant part of the German war effort almost from the begining.
The Nazi party villified Jews from early on, and used socioeconomic differences between the growing number of poorly educated unemployed Germans and the (generally more educated and wealthy) German Jews to fuel their political campign. There were a lot of people that hated Jews at the time -- but pushing mass exeuctions throughout the war? No, I can't agree -- that's too far. There were people unaware of what was happening for a long time -- and there was still a Nazi movement pushing mass exile for Jews up until spring 1941.
That being said, my main objection is that while Jews were being killed, the emphasis wasn't on Jews early on -- though that hardly reduces the bloodshed.
In summary, this "Norah Jones" person is significant because she's the until-recently-estranged daughter of a musician that introduced the sitar to a band that contained Yoko's husband.
I have no qualms playing as terrorists in Counterstrike. In fact I actually prefer it (mostly due to this bogus war on imaginary terrorists threats around the world
+1, True. Sigh.
But in WW2 games, no, I agree with you. It's tough to get any enjoyment playing murdering bastards.
I dunno. I guess that on a leadership level, perhaps the Germans were nastier (at an individual level, as nicely illustrated in Saving Private Ryan, everybody was busy playing hardball). The US imprisoned mass numbers of Japanese US citizens...but they didn't kill them. The Nazis imprisoned, and toward the end of the war, began mass exeuctions of Jews.
However, nobody's hands were exactly clean in WWII, either. The Japanese did some awful things to territories they conqered. The Allies (I believe it was Britain and the United States) were the ones to begin strategic mass killing of civilians on the opposing side by carpet-bombing nonmilitary, purely civilian areas. The United States developed the atomic bomb and dropped it on two cities, obliterating everyone. There's a pretty reasonable argument that these bombs were dropped more to benefit post-war negotiations than to win the war -- Japanese politicians were trying to figure out a graceful exit strategy, and Russia was considering entering the fight.
That being said, I don't see any problem in playing a video game as either side -- I prefer playing the Germans to the Allied forces in Close Combat because of the different play style. It's a video game, and people shouldn't lose sight of that. In various games, I've played a mad leader starting atomic wars, a demon, a vampire, a human-slaughtering horde of aliens, and an undead voodoo warrior. In the majority of video game plots, there is no (or very little) regard for human life. Characters get killed, generally in unpleasant ways. The thing is that people should simply keep sight of the fact that you are *playing a video game*. You should be able to watch Das Boot or play the DM in Dungeon Siege without problems -- you're changing the positions of some polygons and manipulating a bit of memory. Folks would do well not to lose sight of that.
Remember the original Brothers Grimm fairytales. Before they were prettied up for a more modern audience, they were quite gory. Cinderella's stepsisters, for instance, deliberately and on the spot cut away large pieces of their feet to shove their feet into slippers...and when (the spirit of) Cinderella's dead mother notices the blood pouring from the shoes, she rips the stepsisters' eyeballs out. Somehow, parents didn't have a problem telling their kids all this (until recently). Today's society is not more violent that it once was. Our sensibilities have just been tightened a bit.
On at least one of yum or apt-get (which is what Red Hat uses in Fedora), a failed verification causes in the update to fail, since I know I've seen the "won't update without key" message before with Fedora.
A couple of points. First, I very strongly doubt that the machine that Red Hat uses to sign packages and internally archive packages on is anywhere near the machine that exposes packages to the outside world. The worst an attacker could do is make a bunch of packages that would fail signature checks. Note that a malicious RH employee with key access might still be able to sign the package -- not sure what RH policy is WRT this.
A worse hole is the fact that someone could go after the software itself. AFAIK, aside from random folks who might read diffs or CVS, software authors are trusted -- not only not to be malicious, but to keep their Sourceforge accounts secure, etc. If I maintain, say, ftp and a Trojan gets inserted in a clever way, who would notice it immediately? Would RH review a full diff of all changes? Would RH ship it?
Remember the closed-source Borland Interbase that had a backdoor for most of its lifetime. It got fixed once it was open-sourced, but not immediately.
As automated network-based updates become standard, this is a growing problem for the computer world.
Was there anywhere near 3500 dollars in sales lost? The overwhelming number of folks I know of that have music files would never dream of buying anywhere near the number of CDs that they have music files.
I doubt it. From a compensatory damages point of view, I'd have to say that the penalty even *with* the settlement seems awfully dubious, especially given that the burden of the proof rests on the plaintif.
Now, as for punitive damages -- there are teens that run out and smash in windows and spraypaint houses and steal things. They might get fined $500 -- and frankly, I consider the damage of physical objects significantly worse than the only damage caused by pirating music, which is that society may have less music commercially produced than it would otherwise. $3500 is very steep.
This is just to scare people off the P2P networks. It's bullying, it's harrasement. It's like the police coming down the street and smashing your window because you're a petty thief. That's not how you get people to stop breaking the law, that's how you start wars.
Actually, it is.
Most criminals aren't caught, most stolen property not recovered, most murders not solved.
However, the *risk* of getting caught deters a lot more people than the number of people being thrown behind bars.
Unless you're using some awfully rare hardware that few people have hammered on or running development kernels, I'd tend to look at my hardware first.
I managed to hang a stable Linux as a result of playing with the MBONE a couple of years ago -- not that common of a usage situation. Other than that, the only hanging problems I've ever had were from hardware (it took me a while to realize that Windows hard-froze with the same used video card that Linux did).
If you buy something from texas its generally the same price as if you buy it from new york even though these two states have vastly different cost of living.
This is not because of the currency. It's because there are no barriers to trading goods between states (and federal law ensuring that this is the case). I can easily produce something, sell it in Texas, and then move it to New York.
With goods that cannot be transferred trivially (gasoline, real estate), the prices *do* differ.
What you seem to ignore is if they did raise the price Americians would simply buy all their products from India instead of from local retail chains, the internet is useful.
First of all, there are import laws. Most places make an effort to be available to the US because of all the consumer wealth in the US, but if you live somewhere else, many places will not even ship to you because it's not worth the effort to sell.
Second of all, you can run out and convert currency (or even use US dollars where folks will accept them) and many goods *are* much differently priced. Music and movies in Asia are cheaper (and I'm talking about legal, not pirated copies). Getting a prostitute or servant is cheaper. Currency exchange rates have nothing to do with it -- when a magazine says "workers make the equivalent of $1 a day", they *are* passing their pay through exchange rates, the exact same thing that anyone else could do.
Slashdot Mirror
Use Mozilla, and laugh at said malicious websites instead of enduring them.
On Linux, some folks set up loopback encrypted filesystems. A loopback encrypted filesystem cannot be accessed by simply taking a hard drive.
If you can get repeated undected physical access to the machine, you can probably eventually trojan your way to root, though it might involve things as intricate as trojaning the bootloader and whatever utility you're using to decrypt the filesystem.
Are any among us innocent of wanting our 15 minutes?
The problem is that software companies do damned little to reward people that do a good job of turning up and reporting bugs properly. Frankly, if he releases before Apple, then he gets to be quoted all over the place, including mainstream media. He might get to be interviewed. If he instead sits on the problem and waits and he's lucky, he might get a brief note at the bottom of the advisory.
Microsoft and Apple should lay in a big store of T-shirts and mugs, and put a "special thanks" section somewhere in their OS to people that report crucial security holes but don't run out and release them to the public if they don't want a public release. It costs them *far*, *far* less to hand out a "MacGuardian" or somesuch T-shirt and mug and add a mention than it does to deal with the aftermath of a publically available remote root exploit without a fix. Actually, I would have given him a free pass to the next MacWorld or whatnot convention. Have incentives to favor the outcome you want, not discourage it.
On the other hand, Linux is pretty much always full disclosure, since describing problems generally happens in public forums anyway...
"Smitty"...damn, that sounds familiar from the far, far reaches of memory. Google doesn't turn anything up, but did you do an interview with a journalist as a security expert years ago in which you discussed packet sniffing on the Macintosh?
It's not such a problem in mathematics (AFAIK), where definitions tend to be a bit more rigorous, but a tremendous number of philosophical problems can be boiled down to incomplete or incorrect definitions.
I've only run into Qt lightly, and while I've worked on a number of GTK apps and used glade, have never done more than tiny apps purely from scratch. However, here's an attempt at some comparisons:
* Qt has good C++ bindings. Better than GTK, though GTK does have gtkmm.
* I'm not sure whether it's possible to do Qt in C. If so, it would be quite ugly. If you are otherwise entirely neutral as to choice of toolkit and desktop, C fans (traditional UNIX folk) are probably going to prefer GTK, and C++ fans (generally Windows folk) are going to prefer Qt.
* GTK is more widely used and supports more languages outside of C and C++. There are no Qt ocaml bindings, for instance.
* GTK uses less memory and is faster.
* Currently (and according to Qt/KDE developers, due to linker deficiencies), Qt apps launch more slowly than do GTK apps (both toolkits do too damn much init-time processing IMHO).
* There are tearable panes in either KDE or Qt...not sure which. This is a very nice feature that GTK does not do.
* GTK allows (though with GTK 2, a config file option must be enabled) the user to easily rebind key combinations associated with a menu choice. Qt does not do this.
* Qt currently has good support for small framebuffer-based devices. I do not believe that there is as much work on GTK for this (though GTK can go through the framebuffer instead of X).
* Qt is "commercially supported", FWIW.
* GTK is currently more widely used.
* Qt provides more *things* than GTK does (Note: this is based on my experiences, which are biased towards GTK 1 instead of 2). I suspect that you could write an app entirely within Qt -- GTK is designed to supplement the existing UNIX APIs.
* If you're into the ideology, the FSF/GNU people have tended towards supporting GNOME rather than KDE.
* Qt has been around for longer than GTK has.
* Qt widget engines support fading menus. I do not believe that this is currently the case for GTK.
* You may prefer using various apps associated with either GTK or Qt. Features aside, I find that Konqueror feels more like a "native" app to its widget set than does Galeon, but on the other hand, GTK has GIMP and a number of other programs that I use.
* No matter which you use, either API is modern, and light years ahead of Win32 or the Macintosh Toolbox. Programmers who have worked with these in the past are in for a big, big treat. It's *much* easier and faster to write code for common cases, and a lot of neat debugging code is present.
* Qt is better documented. The core GTK functionality is well documented, but some more esoteric GTK or GNOME related libraries have very little documentation.
* GTK's license is LGPL -- frankly, this license is much more generous and gives a good deal mroe freedom than Qt's license, which is GPL at best and commercial (and costs $$$) at worst. Since the core widget set for a platform is a pretty crucial element from a licensing perspective, it's awfully rough to try to force every GUI developer to use a particular license or pay a license fee.
* Both have RAD GUI design tools. I'm unfamiliar with Qt's. GTK's is called glade -- it has a rather awkward interface, but works reasonably well, and has plugins to export to a number of the GTK-supported languages.
* (A bit of a digression) GTK uses glib. Glib is really, really, really cool. Any C programmer out there will *drool* at the idea of having glib's functionality available to their programmers, even if they like Qt (as a matter of fact, KDE now uses glib, IIRC). Not a huge deal for C++, but glib provides some functionality that C could really use, when aimed at application development.
I'm going to digress a bit from Qt/GTK to KDE/GNOME, since your choice of widget set also affects your desktop environment.
In general, from a user perspective, I've found that GTK/GNOME apps tend to be a bit more oriented towards the hacker, and Qt/KDE apps tow
Technically, those are window manager features. You could even use sawfish with KDE.
:-)
Frankly, I'm with you 100% on sawfish. Sawfish is a *fantastic* window manager for folks that aren't dead-set on being lightweight (a la fvwm/twm), aren't hyper-hardcore keyboard-only nuts (ion), aren't eye candy freaks (Enlightenment), and don't require an extremely simplistic window manager (kwm, metacity). If you like emacs and use X, you'll feel right at home with sawfish. Good usability.
Main drawbacks -- doesn't come with a pager, and you have to get one separately. There's a basic config utility which still gives more power than most window managers, but to really make the thing do tricks, you'll want to be comfortable with LISP -- emacs fans should be happy.
Let's see...on other feedback, I would suggest using xbindkeys to launch your external programs, rather than sawfish. As a matter of fact, every program I have running in my X environment is launched from xbindkeys or from a decendant of one of those programs. This has a number of benefits -- xbindkeys is desktop environment independent, allowed me to avoid rare and irritating problems where sawfish would ignore a "launch xterm" command and then when a second "launch xterm" command is sent, launch two, and xbindkeys is somewhat faster -- when I hit Windows-T, I want a terminal *now*.
There are a *ton* of filemanagers for GNOME, but nothing as IEish as Konq and Nautilus -- i.e. overarching meta-application. Lots of lightweights.
If you search for "file manager" and gtk or gnome on Freshmeat, you'll get a number of hits.
If you want something quite lightweight and fast (i.e. you're running a sub-300 Mhz box), using ROX Filer is a neat choice. On the rare occasions when I prefer a GUI utility to bash for file management (usually when working with a set of files with foreign names), Rox has worked nicely.
I think Gnome's widgets are still terribly legacy-driven
Okay, I agree that KDE beats GNOME on:
* Making toolbars always hideable (though this isn't exactly "advanced")
* Tearable panes
However, GNOME beats KDE on:
* Tearable menus
* User rebindable accelerators for menus (KDE has a systemwide version of this, but it's far less powerful).
Both of them lack a couple of advancements that I'd like to see, like trying out pie menus, having a DOCUMENT_UNSAVED window manager hint a la Mac OS and NeXTStep, having a GUI environment for hooking up scripts to sending menu-item/button-clicked signals, a WINDOID window type with the window manager (to do tool palettes a la Mac OS) and a system for working with the window manager to group windows (all GIMP windows together, so that if the user wants he can have WINDOIDs come to the front when raising a window in a group).
KDE's DCOP is nice but not friendly enough and underused. GNOME needs a user-accessable way to send messages to apps.
KDE's system bar sucks in terms of flexibility. Frankly, GNOME 2's system bar ain't as great as GNOME 1's.
Both of the two are bloated compared to most other Linux software, and suck far more RAM and CPU cycles than is necessary.
Oh, and there's no window manager hints for PROCESSING and ERROR states, both of which could be terribly useful once WM authors get their hands on them.
The commercially-backed KDE developers may go away, but Linux software has always lived and died on the strength of volunteers. GNOME may become more dominant, but KDE will always be there.
Yes, God forbid that a company that produces classy software like Qt should ever make any money whatsoever from it.
I don't think anyone said that nobody should be able to make money from classy software. Red Hat makes money and yet you can download ISOs, so there's something going on there.
Frankly, I think TrollTech should have (back in the day) made Qt, handed it out under the LGPL, and then sold a good set of Qt development tools, and tried to get adoped by folks porting commercial software to Linux. There would never have *been* a GNOME, since the license wouldn't have been an issue. It'd be a little harder to make money, yes, though I think they could have made it. They wanted to go for a bigger gamle, though -- commercial control of a major Linux library. There is *tremendous* resistance in the Linux developer community to becoming beholden to any one company. They really didn't want Qt to become another Motif. You don't want the OS that you work on, that is built almost entirely of volunteer-built software, to have as a fundamental component, a non-free set of libraries that all "standard" GUI apps use. And so, I think that the GNOME movement was reasonable, well-founded, and justified. They were not stopping folks from using Qt -- people just said that they wanted to donate time and effort to providing an alternative.
TrollTech held out for a long time -- perhaps long enough to kill their opportunity. Their licensing system is *still* not as free as GTK's, and I think that they will have a tough battle if they attempt to regain their position -- there is currently a significantly larger developer mass behind GNOME, even aside from Linux distributors tending towards GNOME. The only major advantage that they had was early maturity and stability -- and GTK can pretty much go toe to toe with KDE these days.
I can't figure out what you dislike about GTK, frankly. You may prefer C++ to C. That's particularly legitimate if you're an experienced Windows high-level programmer, where C++ and MFC has long been standard. However, GTK is a *very nicely* (IMHO, of course) built example of how to do OOP well in C. It is faster and more modular than Qt, and provides a number of significant features (such as built-in runtime user-level key rebinding) that Qt has not kept pace with.
A number of Qt design decisions were quite reasonable at the time of its production, but are now rather unfortunate in the presence of more solid C++ compilers. Qt contains its own string class, and reimplementation of a good deal of STL functionality. If Qt were being built today, it's doubtable whether these decisions would go the same way.
That being said, choice is nice, and in the end, it's probably a good thing to have two desktops -- if the maintainers of one project don't like your idea, get it tried out on the other desktop. If it works well, the other folks should accept it, and everyone wins.
I liked Matrix Revolutions. (well, pieces...the slow-fast jerky pacing of if it is a bit odd).
On the other hand, I didn't hink that the original Matrix was particularly philosophically interesting -- there's nothing particularly new it in, just things being repackaged for a mass audience. So it came down to special effects and action scenes for me, and both Matrix and Matrix Revolutions had plenty.
Look, here you have this Ring, this totally evil, corrupting, terrible power, and you go to great lengths to make sure the audience knows about it and that even hobbits can't resist its effects forever (Bilbo). Then along comes this Man, Faramir, brother of corruptible Boromir, whose weakness led to his own death even. Faramir says "Nah, fuck it, I wouldn't even pick it up if it were lying there on the ground"
The Ring is addictive. Gandalf and Galadriel also chose not to take it, as did all the folks at the meeting in Rivendel. It's just simply an appealing object (expensive-looking ring, grants amazing powers), and only can really exert nastiness after it's been in someone's posession for a while. (Possible exception -- Smeagol, but he was a nasty character to begin with.)
probably not. mainly due to the cutting that has happened already. like the loss of the resolution to the sauruman plot.
Oh, get real. This is the Lord of the Rings. You realize how much cutting had to happen to get this into any kind of a movie form, *period*? The whole thing'd be something like twenty movies if it were complete.
That being said, I was pretty adverse to the idea of modification to the story and went in to see Fellowship with a pretty bad attitude, and discovered that the movies really are terribly good.
If you want the extended versions, then *buy* the extended versions.
The term is correct -- see here for details. Within the realms of science, a law is specifically a generalization that may be made based *on observation*. Moore was making a generalization based on past observation. He was not making a theoretical claim about the future. All this is quite proper for a law. As a matter of fact, if he was hypothesizing that processor speeds will stop doubling in the next twenty years, that would be a hypothesis, since it's not a generalization based on a body of observation.
Also, WRT your mention of a mathematician -- mathematicians are not scientists -- they are in a class of their own, along with logicians and many computer "scientists". This group works with absolutes, with provable concepts. Scientists do not do this. Science is a system designed to deal with observation and produce effective models of observed things.
URIs don't provide content-based addressing (like a hash of the document). They rely upon trustworthy name registrars, which is an assumption that might have been valid when Berners-Lee was doing his early work, but is not now. They rely on someone willing to continue hosting the original document -- not necessarily the case.
You can link to a article which is then changed by the original publisher (or someone else). With scientific papers, you can't do that -- and such behavior is probably not desireable.
On the up side, if you're currently using cited references, you should be able to build such a system without too much problem -- follow links to PDFs or automatically crawl HTML documents (and check images) and serve all papers that you refer to with your paper. It'd be big, but it provides better reliability than do current paper schemes.
Another feature that might be useful is signing of the content (assuming RSA doesn't get broken in the future).
Basically, if you put up a SHA-1 (Gnutella), MD4 (eDonkey), or similar reference, you can host the original referred-to documents as well as the original host.
If Freenet didn't have as a specific drawback the inability of someone to guarantee that a document remains hosted as long as they are willing to host it, Freenet would be a good choice for this.
One possibility is that, with a bit of manual work, one can frequently find an academic work by Googling for its title. At least for now, as long as you host the original papers as well, Google should pick up on this fact. Of course, it does nothing to prevent modification of that paper by another party...
A good system for handling this would be to have a known system that is willing to archive, in perpetuity (probably hosted by the US government or other reasonably stable, trustworthy source [yes, yes, cracks at the US government aside]). This system would act like a Tier 1 NTP server -- it would only grant access to a number of other trusted servers (universities, etc) that mirror it -- perhaps university systems -- which would keep load sane. These servers (or perhaps Tier 3 servers) then provide public access. Questions of whether there would be a hard policy of never removing content or what would be allowed (especially WRT politically controversial content) would have to be answered.
There could be multiple Tier 1 servers that would sync up with each other, and could act as checks in case one server is broken into. I'm partial to the idea of including a signature on each file, but I suppose it isn't really necessary.
Specific formats could be required to ensure that these papers are readable for all time. Project Gutenberg went with straight ASCII. This would probably have to be slightly more elaborate. Microsoft Word and PDF might not be good choices, and international support would be necessary.
It's a small part of your point but an important detail to get straight -- that is an extremely, extremely sanitized description.
Mmmff. I'd like to add comment on your answer, as well.
The "Final Solution" plan to kill every last Jew on the planet was established in 1941 and specialized SS and SA killing units were following German troops in Eastern Europe that year.
While I'm sure you'd consider it a technicality, Jew within the bounds of the new German-held lands. I don't believe that there'd be an attempt force something like this on, say, Britain. The Einsatzgruppen that you speak of were certainly killing Jews in 1941, but the inital reason they were ordered out was to control newly occupied areas and prevent partisan activity. Jews were just mixed in with a list of politically dangerous people, including Soviet political officials and the like.
But the comprehensive extermination of Jews by the Nazis isn't something that "began", it was a significant part of the German war effort almost from the begining.
The Nazi party villified Jews from early on, and used socioeconomic differences between the growing number of poorly educated unemployed Germans and the (generally more educated and wealthy) German Jews to fuel their political campign. There were a lot of people that hated Jews at the time -- but pushing mass exeuctions throughout the war? No, I can't agree -- that's too far. There were people unaware of what was happening for a long time -- and there was still a Nazi movement pushing mass exile for Jews up until spring 1941.
That being said, my main objection is that while Jews were being killed, the emphasis wasn't on Jews early on -- though that hardly reduces the bloodshed.
In summary, this "Norah Jones" person is significant because she's the until-recently-estranged daughter of a musician that introduced the sitar to a band that contained Yoko's husband.
I think everyone does that. Russia, the United States, Britain...nobody focuses on their own past sins, and magnifies those of the bad guy.
I have no qualms playing as terrorists in Counterstrike. In fact I actually prefer it (mostly due to this bogus war on imaginary terrorists threats around the world
+1, True. Sigh.
But in WW2 games, no, I agree with you. It's tough to get any enjoyment playing murdering bastards.
I dunno. I guess that on a leadership level, perhaps the Germans were nastier (at an individual level, as nicely illustrated in Saving Private Ryan, everybody was busy playing hardball). The US imprisoned mass numbers of Japanese US citizens...but they didn't kill them. The Nazis imprisoned, and toward the end of the war, began mass exeuctions of Jews.
However, nobody's hands were exactly clean in WWII, either. The Japanese did some awful things to territories they conqered. The Allies (I believe it was Britain and the United States) were the ones to begin strategic mass killing of civilians on the opposing side by carpet-bombing nonmilitary, purely civilian areas. The United States developed the atomic bomb and dropped it on two cities, obliterating everyone. There's a pretty reasonable argument that these bombs were dropped more to benefit post-war negotiations than to win the war -- Japanese politicians were trying to figure out a graceful exit strategy, and Russia was considering entering the fight.
That being said, I don't see any problem in playing a video game as either side -- I prefer playing the Germans to the Allied forces in Close Combat because of the different play style. It's a video game, and people shouldn't lose sight of that. In various games, I've played a mad leader starting atomic wars, a demon, a vampire, a human-slaughtering horde of aliens, and an undead voodoo warrior. In the majority of video game plots, there is no (or very little) regard for human life. Characters get killed, generally in unpleasant ways. The thing is that people should simply keep sight of the fact that you are *playing a video game*. You should be able to watch Das Boot or play the DM in Dungeon Siege without problems -- you're changing the positions of some polygons and manipulating a bit of memory. Folks would do well not to lose sight of that.
Remember the original Brothers Grimm fairytales. Before they were prettied up for a more modern audience, they were quite gory. Cinderella's stepsisters, for instance, deliberately and on the spot cut away large pieces of their feet to shove their feet into slippers...and when (the spirit of) Cinderella's dead mother notices the blood pouring from the shoes, she rips the stepsisters' eyeballs out. Somehow, parents didn't have a problem telling their kids all this (until recently). Today's society is not more violent that it once was. Our sensibilities have just been tightened a bit.
On at least one of yum or apt-get (which is what Red Hat uses in Fedora), a failed verification causes in the update to fail, since I know I've seen the "won't update without key" message before with Fedora.
A couple of points. First, I very strongly doubt that the machine that Red Hat uses to sign packages and internally archive packages on is anywhere near the machine that exposes packages to the outside world. The worst an attacker could do is make a bunch of packages that would fail signature checks. Note that a malicious RH employee with key access might still be able to sign the package -- not sure what RH policy is WRT this.
A worse hole is the fact that someone could go after the software itself. AFAIK, aside from random folks who might read diffs or CVS, software authors are trusted -- not only not to be malicious, but to keep their Sourceforge accounts secure, etc. If I maintain, say, ftp and a Trojan gets inserted in a clever way, who would notice it immediately? Would RH review a full diff of all changes? Would RH ship it?
Remember the closed-source Borland Interbase that had a backdoor for most of its lifetime. It got fixed once it was open-sourced, but not immediately.
As automated network-based updates become standard, this is a growing problem for the computer world.
I'd say it seems ridiculous as well.
Was there anywhere near 3500 dollars in sales lost? The overwhelming number of folks I know of that have music files would never dream of buying anywhere near the number of CDs that they have music files.
I doubt it. From a compensatory damages point of view, I'd have to say that the penalty even *with* the settlement seems awfully dubious, especially given that the burden of the proof rests on the plaintif.
Now, as for punitive damages -- there are teens that run out and smash in windows and spraypaint houses and steal things. They might get fined $500 -- and frankly, I consider the damage of physical objects significantly worse than the only damage caused by pirating music, which is that society may have less music commercially produced than it would otherwise. $3500 is very steep.
This is just to scare people off the P2P networks. It's bullying, it's harrasement. It's like the police coming down the street and smashing your window because you're a petty thief. That's not how you get people to stop breaking the law, that's how you start wars.
Actually, it is.
Most criminals aren't caught, most stolen property not recovered, most murders not solved.
However, the *risk* of getting caught deters a lot more people than the number of people being thrown behind bars.
Unless you're using some awfully rare hardware that few people have hammered on or running development kernels, I'd tend to look at my hardware first.
I managed to hang a stable Linux as a result of playing with the MBONE a couple of years ago -- not that common of a usage situation. Other than that, the only hanging problems I've ever had were from hardware (it took me a while to realize that Windows hard-froze with the same used video card that Linux did).
If you buy something from texas its generally the same price as if you buy it from new york even though these two states have vastly different cost of living.
This is not because of the currency. It's because there are no barriers to trading goods between states (and federal law ensuring that this is the case). I can easily produce something, sell it in Texas, and then move it to New York.
With goods that cannot be transferred trivially (gasoline, real estate), the prices *do* differ.
What you seem to ignore is if they did raise the price Americians would simply buy all their products from India instead of from local retail chains, the internet is useful.
First of all, there are import laws. Most places make an effort to be available to the US because of all the consumer wealth in the US, but if you live somewhere else, many places will not even ship to you because it's not worth the effort to sell.
Second of all, you can run out and convert currency (or even use US dollars where folks will accept them) and many goods *are* much differently priced. Music and movies in Asia are cheaper (and I'm talking about legal, not pirated copies). Getting a prostitute or servant is cheaper. Currency exchange rates have nothing to do with it -- when a magazine says "workers make the equivalent of $1 a day", they *are* passing their pay through exchange rates, the exact same thing that anyone else could do.