Why not show the comments alongside or behind the orchestra on a projector screen? Tastefully done, it could even become part of the performance (suitable colors, scenes, or shapes). Sort of like pop/country concerts do with bigscreens, except these would actually intertwine interesting facts instead of the artist's latest video.
Seems like a single screen would be much cheaper than loaning everyone a PDA.
@Stake probably didn't defend him because it knew what he was saying was a biased, and incorrect interpretation. After all, if security is improved by using a variety of products, he'd have said that TCP/IP is the bad boy of internet security (as *all* internet attacks use it), or SMTP, or HTTP, etc. No, instead he singles out MS. At no point did he bother to point out the benefits of a widespread 'standard' either.
Did you even read the paper? TCP, SMTP, and HTTP are open protocols with many different implementations. Generally public protocols don't have major design flaws. It's the implementations that introduce buffer overflows and other exploits. If you have multiple implementations, these exploits tend to get spread around.
I wouldn't mind if Linux was 99% of all systems used today, I think we'd have pretty much the same issues to deal with though - and Geer would be sniping at Linux's security flaws in favour of OpenBSD!
Yes, any monoculture is vulnerable to infections, and 99% Linux would be as well. Its only possible advantage over Windows in that case would the modularity of some of its services, and more open codebase for security audits. But who wants 99% of anything? I'd much prefer the "Big 3" that most mature industries settle on. The fact that we're still 90% Ford Model T means we've got at least a decade or two to go.
Just out of interest, have you ever used VS.NET? Say what you will about their OSes, but VS is an amazingly well built IDE.
Yes, I use it all day, every day, and I just don't see what the big deal is. Those who have confined themselves to the VB ghetto the past ten years are wowed; ditto those who have been using textpad, but having used other IDEs in the past 5-10 years (Delphi, Eclipse, JBuilder), I just don't see the big deal. It's well-built, but it's a rehash of other products. I wouldn't call it "amazing". The web service tools are the only really impressive part I've found that differentiates it from other IDEs. And I hate that I am confined to one OS for every piece of software that I ever write with this thing. I certainly wouldn't use it if I wasn't getting paid to.
Take a look at Eclipse, and I will put money that VS 2005 (or whatever) will "innovate" many features of that IDE, like the very nice lightbulb feature. And those who only get their news from MSDN emails will praise Microsoft for being so fresh and innovative.
Really, I don't play many games on the PC. I got off the treadmill about 5-6 years ago, when I got tired of upgrading every 1.5 years to play the latest rehash game. The last PC games I played heavily were StarCraft and Quake II; other than prettier graphics, I can't see much reason to buy the recent games. Even Sid Meir's Civilization series seemed to tap out after CivII. Since then, I've kept most of my game playing to consoles, and have been very pleased with it. It has also kept my limited computer time very productive.:) Using remote X to a dual athlon means I can compile many things at once and surf the net or do other chores with no slowdown.
Ok, one exception: emus. I love playing classic emulator games, which I can't do on consoles.
Back to the topic. If you like games that don't page-flip, then you should do fine. Examples are: card games, freeCiv, etc. Bad ones are: chromium, lots of SDL games, Mame. Why? Because standard X games (or OpenGL) transmit drawing instructions over the network, which tends to be very light. Instead of slinging 300 pixels across the net to draw a line, they would instead send an instruction like line(1, 1, 300, 1), which is very compact in binary form. OpenGL is the same way, but with very complex scenes the network can get saturated, too. I can run glxgears at about 1200fps over my 100Mbit network, with a GeForce2 on the workstation. Also, X games and software usually don't update the whole window unless they really need to.
Page-flippers update the whole screen/window no matter what, 30 times per second or more. For 16-bit color, 800x600x2 bytes x 30fps = 28.1 Megs per second. A good 100Mbit network peaks at about 12MB/s, so that means frames will get dropped, or the game will run slowly. There's no way to get around this, short of changing the way the game updates graphics. And don't forget that audio must be piped over the network, too, and that can introduce some minor latency issues that show up in action games.
My diskless workstation is an athlon 1GHz, so I actually remote my page-flip games (rsh myworkstation '/usr/bin/chromium') from the downstairs server, so the games actually run on the workstation and don't have to traverse the network. This fixes the problem, but that means you need a real CPU to run the games, which means a loud CPU fan.
In summary, if PC games are very important to you, then you probably don't need to go with remote terminals, at least not without some kind of hybrid approach. One possibility is to dual-boot the workstation to Windows for gaming, and then use hdparm to cycle down the H/D when running diskless Linux.
X is network transparent out-of-the-box, but it is designed and optimized for fast LAN connections. I run my quiet, diskless desktop at home completely remote to my loud monster CPU downstairs, and other than page-flipping applications like many games, it is indistinguishable from running local applications.
This product apparently optimizes X for slow networks.
This feature is the one thing that's kept me with fvwm all this time. I don't like seperate desktops.
XFCE will let you switch desktops with the scroll wheel, which I found to be extremely productive. WindowMaker can do this too. All you have to do is put the pointer over any part of the desktop and you can instantly switch to the previous/next desktop. Avoids the window placement issues of mega-desktops.
I'm not talking about crazy eyecandy and sickening animated whatnots; rather, everything looks like it belongs on the desktop. I open up the mail program, it looks and feels the same as the browser. Et cetera.
XFCE4 uses the Gnome theme settings, so once you set the theme in XFCE, then Evolution, etc, all look the same. You can then set a similar theme in kcontrol for KDE, and everything looks unified.
And BTW, I'm runnning this lightweight WM on a Dual Athlon 2600+ with a Gig of ram, and I can still feel the speed difference between it and KDE/Gnome. Regardless of the speed, my favorite feature is switching desktops with the scroll wheel.:)
Does anyone know if (a) the blue eBook is using this technology, and (b) does anyone have links to larger images of these displays? I'm curious about what kind of resolution these things produce; I couldn't find any dpi numbers in the article, but I skimmed it pretty quickly.
Astronomers from Tacoma to Vladivostok have just reported an ionic disturbance in the vicinity of the Van Allen Belt. Scientists are recommending that necessary precautions be taken.
Well, first of all, I've never even heard of Ability Office. While I'm not omniscient, with the years of Slashdot and Freshmeat perusal under my belt I'd wager that if I haven't heard of it, many here have not, as well.
That's the first hurdle. The second is long-term availability. StarOffice gives me (and more importantly, my wife) a solid office suite whose file formats I can guarantee will be around as long as I can compile its little brother, OpenOffice.org. You can't say that about many other non-MS office suites or word processors. Two years ago I made my wife switch from WordPerfect 8 for Linux to StarOffice for the same reason. Corel pretty much dropped the product after the woeful WP 2000 suite.
Ability might be the greatest thing ever, but odds are that they will be out of business trying to make money by competing with MS in the the office suite market. I for one do not want to have to migrate my documents again when this happens, when I have to move to another product. SO/OOo gives me some security from that event.
I noticed a dramatic improvement in startup times in the latest version (1.4.2), both in console apps and in the browser plugin. If C# has done nothing else, it has at least put some fire under Sun's rear to clean up the client side of things.
I've always just copied libflashplayer.so and ShockwaveFlash.class to my mozilla plugins directory (it checks in several places. I place mine (RH9) in/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins, and all the different versions I install look there so I don't have to touch it).
For remote X, there was a problem with Flash 5 for Linux, so if you're remote, use Flash 6.
You have to carry it with you. If my card gets lost/stolen, the bad guy can only spend with it until I can get to a phone and cancel the card. If he steals my cash, it's gone.
If you don't carry it with you, it's inconvenient to get. You have to go to the bank and get it (but then you have to carry or stash it) or use the ATM to withdraw when you need it.
I use my credit card as my checkbook, and pay it off every month. I get free gasoline (~1.5%), which I wouldn't get with cash.
Personally, I lose all accountability with cash. If I put fifty dollars in my wallet, it somehow gets pissed away faster than if I just have a few bucks + card.
You're correct that cash is important if you want to purchase anonymously, though. And if you fail to pay off the credit card every month (unless you have planned to pay the debt incrementally for a big purchase).
Re:VS sucks
on
Java vs .NET
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm confused. You first deride my comment, and then you appear to agree with it.
My point is that by only looking at a language's version-1.0-time-to-market qualities, tradeoffs must be made. In the case of VB, the tradeoff is that VB is a closely guarded language by a single vendor, rather than the classical academically defined languages like C, C++, Fortran, etc. If Visual C++ goes away, there are other vendors who produce C++ compilers. If Microsoft stops producing VB compilers, there is no one to turn to. Since VB.Net is the next version of VB, and it requires a practical rewrite for large applications, then the previous language known as VB is dead, for all practical purposes. Few to no new applications will be written with the old language.
I don't care how bad your applications are written, odds are your mananagement would not rewrite the applications unless they were forced to by outside forces, because, as you said, the paying customers don't care about languages, they just want feature Y in product Z and they want it now. In this case, the outside force is the vendor who has essentially stopped advancing the compiler for the langauge your apps are written with, and you don't have another VB vendor to turn to.
And as far as developers enjoying the rewrite; beware of what you wish for. We are going through the same thing, and it has been almost two years of pain, beauracracy, and political wrangling. The Second System effect can easily take hold, since people are so afraid of making the mistakes of the old system that they overthink and over-engineer the new system until it collapses under its own weight.
Re:VS sucks
on
Java vs .NET
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Openness and portability are at best liberal afterthoughts...
Hmmm... which is why many companies are having to essentially rewrite all their VB apps because their single-vendor locked-in language has no future. But hey, they were able to cut cost-to-market with VB5, so they saved a bundle, right?
Re:Java's not exactly pining for the fields just n
on
Java vs .NET
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If Sun keeps the enhancements coming and works to bring the development environment up to Visual Studio's standards (Yes, VS has its problems, but it has a lot of unique tools, like compile-and-continue, which save hours!), Java may well survive.
Check out Eclipse for Java development. The workspace/perspective paradigm will take a day or two to get used to (plus the different key bindings), but this is a really nice IDE. I'll wager that MSFT will be copying the "lightbulb" feature of Eclipse that shows you a list of possible solutions to the problem, alongside a preview of the code changes this will entail. Very slick. The GUI could be a little more responsive, though, but so could VS.Net 2003 on a 1.8GHz P4.
I don't think it has a form designer, but for the big projects Eclipse is geared toward those can be more liability than asset.
Ok, now explain why RTF isn't good enough for your resume, which everyone under the sun can read? Of your choices, go pdf. Everybody can read pdf, and if your formatting is that important to you, it'll insure the hr department gets it right.
That's what I do on the first email, but I'm amazed at how many HR people in the tech business don't have acrobat installed and have no idea what it is. I prepared a boilerplate email that explained what it is, a link to download it for free, and I still get requests back to send it in "Word format". They don't understand that if I send the wrong version of "Word format" my Resume may look different on their machine than what I see on mine.
For those people I just print out a paper version and send it via snail mail. They tend to be more comfortable with faxes and xerox, anyway.
As an aside, I think my response rate is better when I mail resume's versus email. Even when they request an email version I send a paper version, as well.
If I want to run Konqueror without running KDE...If I want to run with remote X to a non-XFree86 X server, I should be able to without getting tonnes of errors...
FUD, FUD, FUD...
I can't believe people still try to spread this incompatibility FUD. I use XFCE at home, sometimes WindowMaker, but never KDE or Gnome. I regularly launch Konqueror with no problems. I sometimes run "nautilus --no-desktop" with no problems. GnuCash works fine. So does KStars. Sure, the task tray applets don't work, but I don't have a task tray, so I don't need/want them! If I did, I imagine I could just run kpanel or similar and get the task tray.
The KDE/Gnome libraries must be installed to run these applications, but KDE/Gnome do not need to be running. This is no different from any other platform; try running an MFC (very roughly analagous to Qt) app in Windows with the MFC dlls uninstalled and see how far you get. Ditto with DirectX.
I've also run all these apps remotely using Cygwin and XWin-Pro (now called something else... WinaXe?). If your X server is not working properly you should check with your vendor.
I wonder if one could create a 20-line Gnome tray applet that has the K gear icon, an "exit" popup menu, and just sits there so kdeinit will stay open?
Sure, one could argue that they should have applied patches and that it isn't M$'s fault but tell that to the jury. When surviving relatives see the potential for a profitable liability suit they are going to go after the biggest pockets and that is M$.
Yes, and then software liability will be mandated by legislation and then everyone in the software industry will be trouble. Be careful what you wish for. If MS goes down for something like this, the whole software industry is in trouble. We don't make as much as doctors in this business, so we can't afford the malpractice/liability insurance.
Again, the question should be asked why were mission-critical systems connected directly to any network, other than connections to other mission-critical boxes?
Slashdot Mirror
Why not show the comments alongside or behind the orchestra on a projector screen? Tastefully done, it could even become part of the performance (suitable colors, scenes, or shapes). Sort of like pop/country concerts do with bigscreens, except these would actually intertwine interesting facts instead of the artist's latest video.
Seems like a single screen would be much cheaper than loaning everyone a PDA.
@Stake probably didn't defend him because it knew what he was saying was a biased, and incorrect interpretation. After all, if security is improved by using a variety of products, he'd have said that TCP/IP is the bad boy of internet security (as *all* internet attacks use it), or SMTP, or HTTP, etc. No, instead he singles out MS. At no point did he bother to point out the benefits of a widespread 'standard' either.
Did you even read the paper? TCP, SMTP, and HTTP are open protocols with many different implementations. Generally public protocols don't have major design flaws. It's the implementations that introduce buffer overflows and other exploits. If you have multiple implementations, these exploits tend to get spread around.
I wouldn't mind if Linux was 99% of all systems used today, I think we'd have pretty much the same issues to deal with though - and Geer would be sniping at Linux's security flaws in favour of OpenBSD!
Yes, any monoculture is vulnerable to infections, and 99% Linux would be as well. Its only possible advantage over Windows in that case would the modularity of some of its services, and more open codebase for security audits. But who wants 99% of anything? I'd much prefer the "Big 3" that most mature industries settle on. The fact that we're still 90% Ford Model T means we've got at least a decade or two to go.
Just out of interest, have you ever used VS.NET? Say what you will about their OSes, but VS is an amazingly well built IDE.
Yes, I use it all day, every day, and I just don't see what the big deal is. Those who have confined themselves to the VB ghetto the past ten years are wowed; ditto those who have been using textpad, but having used other IDEs in the past 5-10 years (Delphi, Eclipse, JBuilder), I just don't see the big deal. It's well-built, but it's a rehash of other products. I wouldn't call it "amazing". The web service tools are the only really impressive part I've found that differentiates it from other IDEs. And I hate that I am confined to one OS for every piece of software that I ever write with this thing. I certainly wouldn't use it if I wasn't getting paid to.
Take a look at Eclipse, and I will put money that VS 2005 (or whatever) will "innovate" many features of that IDE, like the very nice lightbulb feature. And those who only get their news from MSDN emails will praise Microsoft for being so fresh and innovative.
RH8.2? I missed that one. I thought the went straight from 8.0 to RH9.
Really, I don't play many games on the PC. I got off the treadmill about 5-6 years ago, when I got tired of upgrading every 1.5 years to play the latest rehash game. The last PC games I played heavily were StarCraft and Quake II; other than prettier graphics, I can't see much reason to buy the recent games. Even Sid Meir's Civilization series seemed to tap out after CivII. Since then, I've kept most of my game playing to consoles, and have been very pleased with it. It has also kept my limited computer time very productive. :) Using remote X to a dual athlon means I can compile many things at once and surf the net or do other chores with no slowdown.
Ok, one exception: emus. I love playing classic emulator games, which I can't do on consoles.
Back to the topic. If you like games that don't page-flip, then you should do fine. Examples are: card games, freeCiv, etc. Bad ones are: chromium, lots of SDL games, Mame. Why? Because standard X games (or OpenGL) transmit drawing instructions over the network, which tends to be very light. Instead of slinging 300 pixels across the net to draw a line, they would instead send an instruction like line(1, 1, 300, 1), which is very compact in binary form. OpenGL is the same way, but with very complex scenes the network can get saturated, too. I can run glxgears at about 1200fps over my 100Mbit network, with a GeForce2 on the workstation. Also, X games and software usually don't update the whole window unless they really need to.
Page-flippers update the whole screen/window no matter what, 30 times per second or more. For 16-bit color, 800x600x2 bytes x 30fps = 28.1 Megs per second. A good 100Mbit network peaks at about 12MB/s, so that means frames will get dropped, or the game will run slowly. There's no way to get around this, short of changing the way the game updates graphics. And don't forget that audio must be piped over the network, too, and that can introduce some minor latency issues that show up in action games.
My diskless workstation is an athlon 1GHz, so I actually remote my page-flip games (rsh myworkstation '/usr/bin/chromium') from the downstairs server, so the games actually run on the workstation and don't have to traverse the network. This fixes the problem, but that means you need a real CPU to run the games, which means a loud CPU fan.
In summary, if PC games are very important to you, then you probably don't need to go with remote terminals, at least not without some kind of hybrid approach. One possibility is to dual-boot the workstation to Windows for gaming, and then use hdparm to cycle down the H/D when running diskless Linux.
X is network transparent out-of-the-box, but it is designed and optimized for fast LAN connections. I run my quiet, diskless desktop at home completely remote to my loud monster CPU downstairs, and other than page-flipping applications like many games, it is indistinguishable from running local applications.
This product apparently optimizes X for slow networks.
This feature is the one thing that's kept me with fvwm all this time. I don't like seperate desktops.
XFCE will let you switch desktops with the scroll wheel, which I found to be extremely productive. WindowMaker can do this too. All you have to do is put the pointer over any part of the desktop and you can instantly switch to the previous/next desktop. Avoids the window placement issues of mega-desktops.
I'm not talking about crazy eyecandy and sickening animated whatnots; rather, everything looks like it belongs on the desktop. I open up the mail program, it looks and feels the same as the browser. Et cetera.
:)
XFCE4 uses the Gnome theme settings, so once you set the theme in XFCE, then Evolution, etc, all look the same. You can then set a similar theme in kcontrol for KDE, and everything looks unified.
And BTW, I'm runnning this lightweight WM on a Dual Athlon 2600+ with a Gig of ram, and I can still feel the speed difference between it and KDE/Gnome. Regardless of the speed, my favorite feature is switching desktops with the scroll wheel.
Does anyone know if (a) the blue eBook is using this technology, and (b) does anyone have links to larger images of these displays? I'm curious about what kind of resolution these things produce; I couldn't find any dpi numbers in the article, but I skimmed it pretty quickly.
Thanks for the links. I wasn't aware of these scripting options.
Astronomers from Tacoma to Vladivostok have just reported an ionic disturbance in the vicinity of the Van Allen Belt. Scientists are recommending that necessary precautions be taken.
Well, first of all, I've never even heard of Ability Office. While I'm not omniscient, with the years of Slashdot and Freshmeat perusal under my belt I'd wager that if I haven't heard of it, many here have not, as well.
That's the first hurdle. The second is long-term availability. StarOffice gives me (and more importantly, my wife) a solid office suite whose file formats I can guarantee will be around as long as I can compile its little brother, OpenOffice.org. You can't say that about many other non-MS office suites or word processors. Two years ago I made my wife switch from WordPerfect 8 for Linux to StarOffice for the same reason. Corel pretty much dropped the product after the woeful WP 2000 suite.
Ability might be the greatest thing ever, but odds are that they will be out of business trying to make money by competing with MS in the the office suite market. I for one do not want to have to migrate my documents again when this happens, when I have to move to another product. SO/OOo gives me some security from that event.
If so many of these machines are currently running OS/2, I wonder why IBM is not rolling out a Linux substitute for their current customers?
I noticed a dramatic improvement in startup times in the latest version (1.4.2), both in console apps and in the browser plugin. If C# has done nothing else, it has at least put some fire under Sun's rear to clean up the client side of things.
Also, this place has headless units for $350, and they are ready to run as LTSP clients.
Even then, you can get older PII class systems used for less than $50 USD, which would run just fine as X terms, with a decent monitor and GFX card.
Will benifits of space and hopefully increased maturity help out the human race
:)
Nah, we'll just carry our bad habits out into space. A little bit of zero gravity won't take the "trailer park" out of us.
I think the makers of StarCraft had a good idea of how human spacefarers would look and act.
I've always just copied libflashplayer.so and ShockwaveFlash.class to my mozilla plugins directory (it checks in several places. I place mine (RH9) in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins, and all the different versions I install look there so I don't have to touch it).
For remote X, there was a problem with Flash 5 for Linux, so if you're remote, use Flash 6.
HTH
- You have to carry it with you. If my card gets lost/stolen, the bad guy can only spend with it until I can get to a phone and cancel the card. If he steals my cash, it's gone.
- If you don't carry it with you, it's inconvenient to get. You have to go to the bank and get it (but then you have to carry or stash it) or use the ATM to withdraw when you need it.
- I use my credit card as my checkbook, and pay it off every month. I get free gasoline (~1.5%), which I wouldn't get with cash.
- Personally, I lose all accountability with cash. If I put fifty dollars in my wallet, it somehow gets pissed away faster than if I just have a few bucks + card.
You're correct that cash is important if you want to purchase anonymously, though. And if you fail to pay off the credit card every month (unless you have planned to pay the debt incrementally for a big purchase).I'm confused. You first deride my comment, and then you appear to agree with it.
My point is that by only looking at a language's version-1.0-time-to-market qualities, tradeoffs must be made. In the case of VB, the tradeoff is that VB is a closely guarded language by a single vendor, rather than the classical academically defined languages like C, C++, Fortran, etc. If Visual C++ goes away, there are other vendors who produce C++ compilers. If Microsoft stops producing VB compilers, there is no one to turn to. Since VB.Net is the next version of VB, and it requires a practical rewrite for large applications, then the previous language known as VB is dead, for all practical purposes. Few to no new applications will be written with the old language.
I don't care how bad your applications are written, odds are your mananagement would not rewrite the applications unless they were forced to by outside forces, because, as you said, the paying customers don't care about languages, they just want feature Y in product Z and they want it now. In this case, the outside force is the vendor who has essentially stopped advancing the compiler for the langauge your apps are written with, and you don't have another VB vendor to turn to.
And as far as developers enjoying the rewrite; beware of what you wish for. We are going through the same thing, and it has been almost two years of pain, beauracracy, and political wrangling. The Second System effect can easily take hold, since people are so afraid of making the mistakes of the old system that they overthink and over-engineer the new system until it collapses under its own weight.
Openness and portability are at best liberal afterthoughts...
Hmmm... which is why many companies are having to essentially rewrite all their VB apps because their single-vendor locked-in language has no future. But hey, they were able to cut cost-to-market with VB5, so they saved a bundle, right?
If Sun keeps the enhancements coming and works to bring the development environment up to Visual Studio's standards (Yes, VS has its problems, but it has a lot of unique tools, like compile-and-continue, which save hours!), Java may well survive.
Check out Eclipse for Java development. The workspace/perspective paradigm will take a day or two to get used to (plus the different key bindings), but this is a really nice IDE. I'll wager that MSFT will be copying the "lightbulb" feature of Eclipse that shows you a list of possible solutions to the problem, alongside a preview of the code changes this will entail. Very slick. The GUI could be a little more responsive, though, but so could VS.Net 2003 on a 1.8GHz P4.
I don't think it has a form designer, but for the big projects Eclipse is geared toward those can be more liability than asset.
Ok, now explain why RTF isn't good enough for your resume, which everyone under the sun can read? Of your choices, go pdf. Everybody can read pdf, and if your formatting is that important to you, it'll insure the hr department gets it right.
That's what I do on the first email, but I'm amazed at how many HR people in the tech business don't have acrobat installed and have no idea what it is. I prepared a boilerplate email that explained what it is, a link to download it for free, and I still get requests back to send it in "Word format". They don't understand that if I send the wrong version of "Word format" my Resume may look different on their machine than what I see on mine.
For those people I just print out a paper version and send it via snail mail. They tend to be more comfortable with faxes and xerox, anyway.
As an aside, I think my response rate is better when I mail resume's versus email. Even when they request an email version I send a paper version, as well.
If I want to run Konqueror without running KDE...If I want to run with remote X to a non-XFree86 X server, I should be able to without getting tonnes of errors...
FUD, FUD, FUD...
I can't believe people still try to spread this incompatibility FUD. I use XFCE at home, sometimes WindowMaker, but never KDE or Gnome. I regularly launch Konqueror with no problems. I sometimes run "nautilus --no-desktop" with no problems. GnuCash works fine. So does KStars. Sure, the task tray applets don't work, but I don't have a task tray, so I don't need/want them! If I did, I imagine I could just run kpanel or similar and get the task tray.
The KDE/Gnome libraries must be installed to run these applications, but KDE/Gnome do not need to be running. This is no different from any other platform; try running an MFC (very roughly analagous to Qt) app in Windows with the MFC dlls uninstalled and see how far you get. Ditto with DirectX.
I've also run all these apps remotely using Cygwin and XWin-Pro (now called something else... WinaXe?). If your X server is not working properly you should check with your vendor.
I wonder if one could create a 20-line Gnome tray applet that has the K gear icon, an "exit" popup menu, and just sits there so kdeinit will stay open?
Sure, one could argue that they should have applied patches and that it isn't M$'s fault but tell that to the jury. When surviving relatives see the potential for a profitable liability suit they are going to go after the biggest pockets and that is M$.
Yes, and then software liability will be mandated by legislation and then everyone in the software industry will be trouble. Be careful what you wish for. If MS goes down for something like this, the whole software industry is in trouble. We don't make as much as doctors in this business, so we can't afford the malpractice/liability insurance.
Again, the question should be asked why were mission-critical systems connected directly to any network, other than connections to other mission-critical boxes?