Right, and no-one here knows a puppy that has cost $2000 in food, toys, additional living space and vet bills right?
Aibo is zero hassle. In the worst case, unlike a dog, if Aibo isn't what you expected you can put it in a cupboard and forget about it. How did all those puppy dogs get abandoned in the first place?
Sony knows that today's Aibo is an expensive toy, but it's part of a long term strategy (a company that size can afford to actually do some forward planning) to be the #1 supplier of home companionship and support robots once there is a market for it. They can only get better and cheaper. Humans aren't getting cheaper, and most of them don't like being treated as servants.
The future Aibo robot will remember where you left your keys yesterday, it may be able to go and fetch them, it can certainly turn off the TV and lights when you fall asleep. It may be able to screen your phone calls, order your groceries and help with your finances.
Of course Aibo will want to play when you're bored. It's not hard to make it play Peek-a-boo or Chess, depending on demand. It will probably chase thrown objects. It will try to make friends with *your* friends, and Sony can probably make it compete with you on the Playstation (even if the AI is secretly in the PS game itself)
If your Aibo smells smoke it will alert you. It will notice if you stop breathing, or if you fall and hurt yourself, and it will summon assistance without panic. Perhaps if people enter the house unexpectedly while you are away or asleep it will call the police.
When you're 25 these features are cool. When you're 45 they're convenient, and when you're 85 and your grandchildren have moved far away they'll seem necessary.
The concept is that an increasing percentage of our population need better care than is economically available today. Aibo is foreshadowing Sony's solution to that problem.
ALSA is a basic requirement for decent audio on Linux, and ALSA supports several cards which have the following properties that (to me, as an amateur) scream "I am not a gamer's card"
* Large numbers of channels
* Support for 96kHz sampling rate
* Support for 24-bit samples
* Manufacturer's web site talks about "audio I/O" and "Multitrack recording" rather than "3D Surround" and "Explosive Bass"
* Price > $300
* Far too many odd-looking connectors
So, are these cards suitable for Linux pro-audio (in which case the problem IS the software after all) or am I totally out of my depth?
Use Flac, or shorten, or any lossless compression codec with (at least) source available.
This gives you approx 2:1 compression on clean CD rips, much better on quiet stuff and (of course) closer to 1:1 on noise. So we're talking about maybe 300Mb or so per album.
For $1 per album or less (prices always falling) you will kick yourself if you rip to 128Kbit MP3 now and then waste another week of your life re-ripping the CDs (if they haven't died) at higher quality later in your life.
Think you're never going to want higher quality? If you're at 192Kbit/s or lower think again, the artifacts in MP3 and Vorbis get more obvious the more you listen to compressed sound. Originals sound eerily "more lifelike" and eventually you will go back to your CDs "just to check" and find that the difference was there after all.
Why use Flac rather than just leaving WAVs on the disk? Well for one thing, disk is cheap but it isn't free. I save up to 50% just by running some free software == bargain.
Also, please for the love of all that is good use paranoid / seamless CD ripping. If I hear one more person playing their "CD quality" rips with obvious jumps in them I will scream.
Re:I thought they said they were done with browser
on
Netscape 6.1
·
· Score: 2
That's right. So-called "Web" designers want to make "web pages" for IE 5 running on Windows 98 in 16-bit color at 800x600 or 1024x768. (some of them will begrudge you that last choice)
You have IE5.5? You run W2K? You like 1280x1024?
Sorry, web designers have no time for non-standard setups, it's all about the Average User.
If you're paying any "designers" who think along these lines -- fire them, at best they'll buy you an accessibility lawsuit down the line, at worst your customers will upgrade and just stop using your site.
Why is it that so many sites like this one offer spreadsheets for download as "XLS" when in fact the contents of the file you receive are simply plain text? Just because PC users are too dim to load Excel themselves?
No wonder so many people think they need Office to make effective use of the web. How about if I start making all the images on my site "Gimp" images when they're really just PNGs?
Hmm. actually that's not much more mean that what I've done to my homepage. Try that in MS Win IE - oops, someone doesn't understand W3C font/charset interaction recommendations.
If your PHBs are worried about having a "supported tool" then IE 5 for Unix is not it.
Look at the link you used, and check out the patches available for IE5/Solaris. There are at least a dozen known bugs which have been patched on Windows IE but not on either Unix version.
Bugtraq discussed this a while back, and the conclusion was that "IE for Unix" is like "Netscape for Win3.1" - not something to bet on.
Toolbar coming right up.
Install Mozilla and/or Netscape 6.01 and you will have the desired toolbar right there.
AFAIK You (the website designer) can style the toolbar, and steps are being taken to make it more friendly in later versions, but yes, today, it is there and working.
1. That would be Transfer-encoding, a Content-encoding is not supposed to be removed by the UA, (except to display it) while a transfer encoding is transparent and should be removed.
2. AFAIK almost no-one uses compressed HTML because of a Windows IE bug. Blame Bill.
ID's "simultaneous release" meant that US shoppers were buying Win32 Q3A boxes in stores weeks before Loki were able to process "priority" orders for the Linux version.
I called shops over here "Will you have it?" "Yes". "On Linux?" "Yes." "Should I order?" "No, we'll get lots". Six months later they've never seen a single copy. I bought by mail order, from the states, paid a huge premium and got comparatively bad service, late. Only a few hard core people are going to put up with that. It shows.
Now, you own Linux and Windows, you know ID won't let you run one CD on both, and you know the Linux CD won't come for a month (maybe two). Which do you order? It's a no brainer. Good thing we're not depending on the Games industry to lead us anywhere these days.
0207 is NOT an area code in the UK. 020 is the London area code, and Central London phone numbers now start with "7". Outer London numbers begin with "8", but soon other numbers will also be common in the new London exchanges.
The long period needed to educate the public about stuff like this is the reason why it took SIX years to complete the changes -- it's all really part of one master plan, but the public were deemed to be too stupid to cope with it all in one dose. Hence the intermediary stages.
London was always meant to be unified; 0171, 0181 were temporary measures to scrape some space in the old overcrowded numeric space.
How the US hopes to continue crushing people into a 10 digit space I do not know, maybe they're hoping IP telephony will destroy "phone numbers" before they run out of them...
My phone number is +44 7974 246511. If you don't have a "+" symbol on your phone, get a better phone:)
IE availability really exists only for Windows and MacOS, and these two versions share no meaningful quantity of code. So write a page for one, will it work in the other? Maybe. Will it look the same? Probably not.
Meanwhile the "Unix" port of IE is comparatively poor (no better than Netscape for those platforms) and is not fully supported (e.g. no security fix releases, despite the fact that they're just as vulnerable as Windows IE) and its a huge resource hog. Must I buy 256Mb systems just to run a web browser now? (I could compile Mozilla from source with a boz like that)
In fact, the MacOS IE is a decent browser, WaSP would be howling for Netscape's head if Win IE had achieved the lofty scores of Mac IE, as it is Windows now has the WORST set of browsers for standards compliance, with (of all things) Opera being the closest to OK until NS6 was released.
Well, given that "click on the 'make SSL work' button" is too hard for you, it may be some time.
Probably a month or two before the Free Software SSL implementation is polished and bolted on to the Mozilla core.
Meanwhile, find someone real smart and ask them to help you click the button. There, much better isn't it.
(No kidding, there really IS a button which does that, thanks to the wonders of XPinstall)
Red Hat didn't add that feature, Linux 2.2.x post CPU ID fiasco includes a feature to disable the unique ID during boot, before userspace apps have a chance to read it.
Unfortunately it triggers for non-Intel hardware too, so later revisions (x >= 16) check first. Kernel boot line overrides it (see previous posts)
This bit me on a hand-built kernel with same old disks but a new MB, Duron 700, etc.
Booting a rescue kernel buys you an opportunity to check the solutions database, find the magic bootline and install a fixed kernel. Bingo.
Temporary copy of NT4 survived this switch (but doesn't do ATA66, USB, etc.)
On a friend's upgrade Win95 (98?) went haywire and now refuses to see USB or work properly with his Dual Head G400.
Yeah, IE for Windows is broken as usual. They think sRGB is 2.0 (or 1.8 or some other nonsense) and then wander off into fairy land screwing up all your colours.
If you like IE, buy a Mac and run Mac IE 5.0 which is a really nice web browser, not Win IE 5.5 which is yet another bodge from the people who brought you "Windows 98 Second Edition"
FWIW MS have promised to implement PNG (a mid 90s standard) properly in their "new" web browser due out late 2001. Making them the absolute last people to arrive at the party, but you just know it'll say "innovative" on the label.
Auditing is only half the battle, OpenBSD also wins by "default configuration".
That is to say on the few occasions when Theo doesn't say "Blah, blah, blah... Not Vulnerable" he usually gets to say this instead:
This software is not installed/ configured/ active by default on OpenBSD, only people who actually needed it will be affected.
While it may be a few years yet before you see Red Hat doing a full code audit of their core distro, we are already seeing a conversion to the "secure by default" behaviour advocated by OpenBSD.
Red Hat 7.0 will ship with options that lock down machines more than any previous version, and you'll see the same trend in SuSE or Debian.
Another huge win OpenBSD brought to all Free operating systems, is "Crypto everywhere".
This policy means new boxes by default use strong crypto to protect package systems, remote admin, and other areas which five years ago were vulnerable on every Unix install.
Re:Why GPG is STILL partly vulnerable to ADK attac
on
GPG vs. PGP?
·
· Score: 2
Lots of people have specified this (broken clients exist, bad people exist) as a reason to create v3 keys using PGP 2.6.2 and "accept no alternative".
This problem (attacker compromises friendly user, intercepts message) is ALWAYS present in a PGP system.
To mitigate it, EVERY person who communicates with you must take steps to ensure that they have a "known good" version of PGP, a secure working environment (preferably unwired) and a strong passphrase.
Note that, as always, Mallory risks giving everything away for the attack. Smart users would notice (even in PGP) that something was odd about these "stealth ADK" keys, there were so many tell-tale signs.
However, most of us don't know that many smart users, and in that case, Mallory could equally replace their copy of PGP, insert a forged key for your name, steal the plaintext, or compromise the system a million other ways.
Only the most paranoid groups could possibly use PGP without significant risk in the face of a determined and resourceful enemy.
Fortunately, most of us don't have such enemies, and can relax our deathgrip a little.
I was really disappointed at how few people you can fit in a Ferrari or Porsche. Those guys need to take some lessons on designing large passenger vehicles instead of modding a Ford Model A with the same stupid "two person" design. A bright red Ferrari is RIDICULOUSLY small. I tried to take my extended family to Wembley in one and only my sister/mother and I fitted in the car.
If you played Quake 3 single player and were disappointed, you can go and stand in the corner with the guys who bought our "Potato server" joke. Quake 3 is a multi-player 3D engine for the Internet. If the "lame-ass" models aren't controlled by a Real Human Being, you're just playing a shadow of the real game.
Buy Half-life, finish it. Done. End of $40. Buy Q3, play friends, join clan, play Aqua, HH, Q3F, get real on their asses. Cheaper, and better value.
This question is full of confusion, about what Copyright is (why not ASK JEEVES, rather than Slashdot.. should we also tell you what 1+1 is?) Also confused about Microsoft's proposals, how design rights, copyrights, and "interoperability" work in the field of IP. Basically, this post is too confused to get any useful examples, as exemplified by the dozens of unrelated rants you'll find in the resulting discussion.
Most importantly: When I buy a car I can (for the purposes of this discussion) do anything I like with the car. Making identical cars would be (1) Very difficult (2) Unprofitable It's not that it's illegal (if I didn't steal the actual design plans, it probably isn't) it's just not PRACTICAL.
To answer the question in the Subject: Yes, Open Source means Free. There's no reason to have two terms except market confusion. ESR coined the "new" term because he doesn't "get it":)
No, actual XML support. Like Mozilla. I can take an arbitrary piece of XML, add a stylesheet directive and turn it into a wonderful web presentation of the same data. The book example shows Mozilla rendering the same XML fragment as a two great looking E-commerce interfaces, from the same data. Just alter the CSS and all your database content flows into the new layout.
You can achieve 99% of this with HTML and scripting, but why bother? If browsers like Mac IE and Mozilla support XML properly it will all Just Work (TM)
Where do you get off with "all hardware is proprietary in some way" Just because you're using an Intel PIII on some undocumented Taiwanese motherboard, doesn't mean we should all put up with such rubbish. At my place of work they built their own Sparc mboards, not just because they could, but because their's are better suited to the job than a hacked open Sun (cheaper too) The Sparc CPU, boards, and most other chips are well documented, can be sourced from multiple parties and are eminently Open to software.
The car analogy is daft too, an experienced mechanic *with* the right tools could repair most faults during the lifetime of a typical family car. There are manuals telling you how on the open market, there are third party parts manufacturers (actually the real manufacturer often just rebadges such parts) However, cars are not software, so there's a significant up-front investment in materials needed before you can really do anything. This means that most such work is done by medium-sized companies -- but they're STILL frequently independent of any manufacturer or vendor.
Doh! s/with a web server/without a web server/
I meant here that htaccess bugs don't bite anyone who isn't running web servers. That's a LOT of file/print servers for a start.
Like the MS bug last week, this requires a combination of things to happen before it's a threat. Unlike that bug, this is NEW, easily spotted and fixed, and not widely installed.
"a large vulnerability in a very popular piece of software"
Nope, you should read more than the MSNBC piece before commenting...
This is a cluster-management tool, not installed by default in any configuration, not useful to >99% of all systems running Red Hat.
Everyone using Linux on the desktop is immune, everyone with a web server is immune, almost everyone using clusters is immune modulo password guessing attacks, because they have changed their admin passwords. Alan Cox has already said PERSONALLY that he audited this code and missed the line Red Hat have changed in their fix. Could Theo have missed that line too? I think the answer is yes.
So, most people who get bitten by this will have failed to follow one of OpenBSD's rules -- don't start or even install services you don't need. Red Hat 6.2 comes a lot closer (thou not yet close enough) to OBSD's ideals in this regard, and one setback shouldn't be seen as proof that they're incompetent.
If Theo announces a kernel-level user-to-root escalation in OBSD4 next week, I won't be shouting "See, OBSD is rubbish", and I think Red Hat deserve more credit than this too.
Before starting out I should remind anyone who doesn't know that I'm a Gimp developer... I'm writing this only because I saw a lot of people comparing Gimp and Photogenics elsewhere, many of them without even trying either as far as I could tell.
This is a painting app. Paul doesn't (so far as I know) claim that it's anything else. But many modern packages are more than this, and you shouldn't be surprised that there's a lot of stuff Photogenics just plain can't do. Anyone who's baffled by layers (say in Gimp or Photoshop) but needs more power than PSP4 or KPaint should check out Photogenics, at worst it will be a gentle introduction to layers and you'll understand other packages better after trying it. For the "from-scratch" digital artist, it's certainly not so hard to draw stuff in Photogenics as it is in Gimp, or for that matter Photoshop, but then it's even EASIER in MS Paint. Is this a good compromise? Perhaps. If "paintbrush" and "chalk stick" don't sound like cornerpoints of your days digital image work, then you don't need this app. Just as many drawings done in 5 mins in Photogenics would be an hours work in Gimp, there are many 5 minute techniques for Gimp that PG just can't replicate.
For me, as both a non-artist and a Free Software developer, this app doesn't mean much, for some artists though, there is no doubt this is an important class of app on Linux and they should be trying this out.. now.
The "formatting codes" you're talking about in a typical technical document are much easier to work with than the brain-dead formatting you'll see in a typical Word document. While it is POSSIBLE to write good documents (using style, auto-numbering and proper section division techniques) in Word, it is very much more difficult than it should be, and so most people don't bother -- even technical writers. The technical review of some student work I did the other day found that they had multiple section 9.4.12s -- because they couldn't get Word to number things properly, so they typed the numbers by hand. This causes mayhem in the editing cycle. Now compare LaTeX's clean section numbering mechanism -- I've never seen anyone do it manually because the built-ins are much easier. Watch tech doc tools build an Index and compare it to the so-called "index" and contents pages from Word. Night and Day. So, whilst it's nice to have AbiWord or KWord (well, KWord is more FrameMaker than Word) for brief memos and two page layouts, LaTeX wins hands down for serious technical docs. Can anyone comment on the suitability of LyX for this task (and how its output meets the requirements of this new license)?
Re:A bad book by Banks' standards
on
Inversions
·
· Score: 1
A gift, a gift from... a friend? the culture?, surely any reader is sharp enough to know why the Doctor is carrying such a blunt instrument as if it would protect her from all the wickedness in the world? There's even an Ian M Banks story called "A gift from the culture" which makes sure you know what kind of protection a Culture citizen carries when she's alone in a strange land. Unlike the character in that story the Doctor has not rejected her citizenship, she's still firmly in possession of her technological birthright. I would have cried foul if a drone had arrived (why would a drone bore itself hiding on an uncontacted planet) but the knife is non-sentient, just a smart tool. She probably used it earlier on the two lads who sought to rape her, I haven't read it recently enough to be sure if that's likely.
Deus Ex Machina would be more appropriate if Jeffrey Archer pulled this stunt - should I also be surprised that she disappears in a locked room mystery when I already know there's several million tons of technology waiting in orbit (or is it even in orbit? A Contact vessel summoned to remove a threatened pawn could probably do locked room mysteries with its eyes firmly shut, a light year out of the system)
Slashdot Mirror
Right, and no-one here knows a puppy that has cost $2000 in food, toys, additional living space and vet bills right?
Aibo is zero hassle. In the worst case, unlike a dog, if Aibo isn't what you expected you can put it in a cupboard and forget about it. How did all those puppy dogs get abandoned in the first place?
Sony knows that today's Aibo is an expensive toy, but it's part of a long term strategy (a company that size can afford to actually do some forward planning) to be the #1 supplier of home companionship and support robots once there is a market for it. They can only get better and cheaper. Humans aren't getting cheaper, and most of them don't like being treated as servants.
The future Aibo robot will remember where you left your keys yesterday, it may be able to go and fetch them, it can certainly turn off the TV and lights when you fall asleep. It may be able to screen your phone calls, order your groceries and help with your finances.
Of course Aibo will want to play when you're bored. It's not hard to make it play Peek-a-boo or Chess, depending on demand. It will probably chase thrown objects. It will try to make friends with *your* friends, and Sony can probably make it compete with you on the Playstation (even if the AI is secretly in the PS game itself)
If your Aibo smells smoke it will alert you. It will notice if you stop breathing, or if you fall and hurt yourself, and it will summon assistance without panic. Perhaps if people enter the house unexpectedly while you are away or asleep it will call the police.
When you're 25 these features are cool. When you're 45 they're convenient, and when you're 85 and your grandchildren have moved far away they'll seem necessary.
The concept is that an increasing percentage of our population need better care than is economically available today. Aibo is foreshadowing Sony's solution to that problem.
ALSA is a basic requirement for decent audio on Linux, and ALSA supports several cards which have the following properties that (to me, as an amateur) scream "I am not a gamer's card"
* Large numbers of channels
* Support for 96kHz sampling rate
* Support for 24-bit samples
* Manufacturer's web site talks about "audio I/O" and "Multitrack recording" rather than "3D Surround" and "Explosive Bass"
* Price > $300
* Far too many odd-looking connectors
So, are these cards suitable for Linux pro-audio (in which case the problem IS the software after all) or am I totally out of my depth?
Use Flac, or shorten, or any lossless compression codec with (at least) source available.
This gives you approx 2:1 compression on clean CD rips, much better on quiet stuff and (of course) closer to 1:1 on noise. So we're talking about maybe 300Mb or so per album.
For $1 per album or less (prices always falling) you will kick yourself if you rip to 128Kbit MP3 now and then waste another week of your life re-ripping the CDs (if they haven't died) at higher quality later in your life.
Think you're never going to want higher quality? If you're at 192Kbit/s or lower think again, the artifacts in MP3 and Vorbis get more obvious the more you listen to compressed sound. Originals sound eerily "more lifelike" and eventually you will go back to your CDs "just to check" and find that the difference was there after all.
Why use Flac rather than just leaving WAVs on the disk? Well for one thing, disk is cheap but it isn't free. I save up to 50% just by running some free software == bargain.
Also, please for the love of all that is good use paranoid / seamless CD ripping. If I hear one more person playing their "CD quality" rips with obvious jumps in them I will scream.
That's right. So-called "Web" designers want to make "web pages" for IE 5 running on Windows 98 in 16-bit color at 800x600 or 1024x768. (some of them will begrudge you that last choice) You have IE5.5? You run W2K? You like 1280x1024? Sorry, web designers have no time for non-standard setups, it's all about the Average User. If you're paying any "designers" who think along these lines -- fire them, at best they'll buy you an accessibility lawsuit down the line, at worst your customers will upgrade and just stop using your site.
Why is it that so many sites like this one offer spreadsheets for download as "XLS" when in fact the contents of the file you receive are simply plain text? Just because PC users are too dim to load Excel themselves?
No wonder so many people think they need Office to make effective use of the web. How about if I start making all the images on my site "Gimp" images when they're really just PNGs?
Hmm. actually that's not much more mean that what I've done to my homepage. Try that in MS Win IE - oops, someone doesn't understand W3C font/charset interaction recommendations.
If your PHBs are worried about having a "supported tool" then IE 5 for Unix is not it.
Look at the link you used, and check out the patches available for IE5/Solaris. There are at least a dozen known bugs which have been patched on Windows IE but not on either Unix version.
Bugtraq discussed this a while back, and the conclusion was that "IE for Unix" is like "Netscape for Win3.1" - not something to bet on.
Toolbar coming right up.
Install Mozilla and/or Netscape 6.01 and you will have the desired toolbar right there.
AFAIK You (the website designer) can style the toolbar, and steps are being taken to make it more friendly in later versions, but yes, today, it is there and working.
Now use it. (ie provide LINKs in your pages)
1. That would be Transfer-encoding, a Content-encoding is not supposed to be removed by the UA, (except to display it) while a transfer encoding is transparent and should be removed.
2. AFAIK almost no-one uses compressed HTML because of a Windows IE bug. Blame Bill.
ID's "simultaneous release" meant that US shoppers were buying Win32 Q3A boxes in stores weeks before Loki were able to process "priority" orders for the Linux version.
I called shops over here "Will you have it?" "Yes". "On Linux?" "Yes." "Should I order?" "No, we'll get lots". Six months later they've never seen a single copy. I bought by mail order, from the states, paid a huge premium and got comparatively bad service, late. Only a few hard core people are going to put up with that. It shows.
Now, you own Linux and Windows, you know ID won't let you run one CD on both, and you know the Linux CD won't come for a month (maybe two). Which do you order? It's a no brainer. Good thing we're not depending on the Games industry to lead us anywhere these days.
Better clear it up just in case:
:)
0207 is NOT an area code in the UK. 020 is the London area code, and Central London phone numbers now start with "7". Outer London numbers begin with "8", but soon other numbers will also be common in the new London exchanges.
The long period needed to educate the public about stuff like this is the reason why it took SIX years to complete the changes -- it's all really part of one master plan, but the public were deemed to be too stupid to cope with it all in one dose. Hence the intermediary stages.
London was always meant to be unified; 0171, 0181 were temporary measures to scrape some space in the old overcrowded numeric space.
How the US hopes to continue crushing people into a 10 digit space I do not know, maybe they're hoping IP telephony will destroy "phone numbers" before they run out of them...
My phone number is +44 7974 246511. If you don't have a "+" symbol on your phone, get a better phone
IE availability really exists only for Windows and MacOS, and these two versions share no meaningful quantity of code. So write a page for one, will it work in the other? Maybe. Will it look the same? Probably not.
Meanwhile the "Unix" port of IE is comparatively poor (no better than Netscape for those platforms) and is not fully supported (e.g. no security fix releases, despite the fact that they're just as vulnerable as Windows IE) and its a huge resource hog. Must I buy 256Mb systems just to run a web browser now? (I could compile Mozilla from source with a boz like that)
In fact, the MacOS IE is a decent browser, WaSP would be howling for Netscape's head if Win IE had achieved the lofty scores of Mac IE, as it is Windows now has the WORST set of browsers for standards compliance, with (of all things) Opera being the closest to OK until NS6 was released.
Well, given that "click on the 'make SSL work' button" is too hard for you, it may be some time.
Probably a month or two before the Free Software SSL implementation is polished and bolted on to the Mozilla core.
Meanwhile, find someone real smart and ask them to help you click the button. There, much better isn't it.
(No kidding, there really IS a button which does that, thanks to the wonders of XPinstall)
Red Hat didn't add that feature, Linux 2.2.x post CPU ID fiasco includes a feature to disable the unique ID during boot, before userspace apps have a chance to read it.
Unfortunately it triggers for non-Intel hardware too, so later revisions (x >= 16) check first. Kernel boot line overrides it (see previous posts)
This bit me on a hand-built kernel with same old disks but a new MB, Duron 700, etc.
Booting a rescue kernel buys you an opportunity to check the solutions database, find the magic bootline and install a fixed kernel. Bingo.
Temporary copy of NT4 survived this switch (but doesn't do ATA66, USB, etc.)
On a friend's upgrade Win95 (98?) went haywire and now refuses to see USB or work properly with his Dual Head G400.
Yeah, IE for Windows is broken as usual. They think sRGB is 2.0 (or 1.8 or some other nonsense) and then wander off into fairy land screwing up all your colours.
If you like IE, buy a Mac and run Mac IE 5.0 which is a really nice web browser, not Win IE 5.5 which is yet another bodge from the people who brought you "Windows 98 Second Edition"
FWIW MS have promised to implement PNG (a mid 90s standard) properly in their "new" web browser due out late 2001. Making them the absolute last people to arrive at the party, but you just know it'll say "innovative" on the label.
Auditing is only half the battle, OpenBSD also wins by "default configuration".
That is to say on the few occasions when Theo doesn't say "Blah, blah, blah... Not Vulnerable" he usually gets to say this instead:
This software is not installed/ configured/ active by default on OpenBSD, only people who actually needed it will be affected.
While it may be a few years yet before you see Red Hat doing a full code audit of their core distro, we are already seeing a conversion to the "secure by default" behaviour advocated by OpenBSD.
Red Hat 7.0 will ship with options that lock down machines more than any previous version, and you'll see the same trend in SuSE or Debian.
Another huge win OpenBSD brought to all Free operating systems, is "Crypto everywhere".
This policy means new boxes by default use strong crypto to protect package systems, remote admin, and other areas which five years ago were vulnerable on every Unix install.
Lots of people have specified this (broken clients exist, bad people exist) as a reason to create v3 keys using PGP 2.6.2 and "accept no alternative".
This problem (attacker compromises friendly user, intercepts message) is ALWAYS present in a PGP system.
To mitigate it, EVERY person who communicates with you must take steps to ensure that they have a "known good" version of PGP, a secure working environment (preferably unwired) and a strong passphrase.
Note that, as always, Mallory risks giving everything away for the attack. Smart users would notice (even in PGP) that something was odd about these "stealth ADK" keys, there were so many tell-tale signs.
However, most of us don't know that many smart users, and in that case, Mallory could equally replace their copy of PGP, insert a forged key for your name, steal the plaintext, or compromise the system a million other ways.
Only the most paranoid groups could possibly use PGP without significant risk in the face of a determined and resourceful enemy.
Fortunately, most of us don't have such enemies, and can relax our deathgrip a little.
I was really disappointed at how few people you can fit in a Ferrari or Porsche.
Those guys need to take some lessons on designing large passenger vehicles instead of modding a Ford Model A with the same stupid "two person" design. A bright red Ferrari is RIDICULOUSLY small. I tried to take my extended family to Wembley in one and only my sister/mother and I fitted in the car.
If you played Quake 3 single player and were disappointed, you can go and stand in the corner with the guys who bought our "Potato server" joke.
Quake 3 is a multi-player 3D engine for the Internet. If the "lame-ass" models aren't controlled by a Real Human Being, you're just playing a shadow of the real game.
Buy Half-life, finish it. Done. End of $40.
Buy Q3, play friends, join clan, play Aqua, HH, Q3F, get real on their asses. Cheaper, and better value.
This question is full of confusion, about what Copyright is (why not ASK JEEVES, rather than Slashdot.. should we also tell you what 1+1 is?)
:)
Also confused about Microsoft's proposals, how design rights, copyrights, and "interoperability" work in the field of IP.
Basically, this post is too confused to get any useful examples, as exemplified by the dozens of unrelated rants you'll find in the resulting discussion.
Most importantly: When I buy a car I can (for the purposes of this discussion) do anything I like with the car. Making identical cars would be (1) Very difficult (2) Unprofitable
It's not that it's illegal (if I didn't steal the actual design plans, it probably isn't) it's just not PRACTICAL.
To answer the question in the Subject: Yes, Open Source means Free. There's no reason to have two terms except market confusion. ESR coined the "new" term because he doesn't "get it"
No, actual XML support. Like Mozilla.
I can take an arbitrary piece of XML, add a stylesheet directive and turn it into a wonderful web presentation of the same data.
The book example shows Mozilla rendering the same XML fragment as a two great looking E-commerce interfaces, from the same data. Just alter the CSS and all your database content flows into the new layout.
You can achieve 99% of this with HTML and scripting, but why bother? If browsers like Mac IE and Mozilla support XML properly it will all Just Work (TM)
Where do you get off with "all hardware is proprietary in some way"
Just because you're using an Intel PIII on some undocumented Taiwanese motherboard, doesn't mean we should all put up with such rubbish.
At my place of work they built their own Sparc mboards, not just because they could, but because their's are better suited to the job than a hacked open Sun (cheaper too)
The Sparc CPU, boards, and most other chips are well documented, can be sourced from multiple parties and are eminently Open to software.
The car analogy is daft too, an experienced mechanic *with* the right tools could repair most faults during the lifetime of a typical family car.
There are manuals telling you how on the open market, there are third party parts manufacturers (actually the real manufacturer often just rebadges such parts)
However, cars are not software, so there's a significant up-front investment in materials needed before you can really do anything.
This means that most such work is done by medium-sized companies -- but they're STILL frequently independent of any manufacturer or vendor.
Doh! s/with a web server/without a web server/
I meant here that htaccess bugs don't bite anyone who isn't running web servers. That's a LOT of file/print servers for a start.
Like the MS bug last week, this requires a combination of things to happen before it's a threat. Unlike that bug, this is NEW, easily spotted and fixed, and not widely installed.
"a large vulnerability in a very popular piece of software"
Nope, you should read more than the MSNBC piece before commenting...
This is a cluster-management tool, not installed by default in any configuration, not useful to >99% of all systems running Red Hat.
Everyone using Linux on the desktop is immune, everyone with a web server is immune, almost everyone using clusters is immune modulo password guessing attacks, because they have changed their admin passwords. Alan Cox has already said PERSONALLY that he audited this code and missed the line Red Hat have changed in their fix. Could Theo have missed that line too? I think the answer is yes.
So, most people who get bitten by this will have failed to follow one of OpenBSD's rules -- don't start or even install services you don't need. Red Hat 6.2 comes a lot closer (thou not yet close enough) to OBSD's ideals in this regard, and one setback shouldn't be seen as proof that they're incompetent.
If Theo announces a kernel-level user-to-root escalation in OBSD4 next week, I won't be shouting "See, OBSD is rubbish", and I think Red Hat deserve more credit than this too.
Before starting out I should remind anyone who doesn't know that I'm a Gimp developer... I'm writing this only because I saw a lot of people comparing Gimp and Photogenics elsewhere, many of them without even trying either as far as I could tell.
This is a painting app. Paul doesn't (so far as I know) claim that it's anything else. But many modern packages are more than this, and you shouldn't be surprised that there's a lot of stuff Photogenics just plain can't do.
Anyone who's baffled by layers (say in Gimp or Photoshop) but needs more power than PSP4 or KPaint should check out Photogenics, at worst it will be a gentle introduction to layers and you'll understand other packages better after trying it.
For the "from-scratch" digital artist, it's certainly not so hard to draw stuff in Photogenics as it is in Gimp, or for that matter Photoshop, but then it's even EASIER in MS Paint. Is this a good compromise? Perhaps.
If "paintbrush" and "chalk stick" don't sound like cornerpoints of your days digital image work, then you don't need this app. Just as many drawings done in 5 mins in Photogenics would be an hours work in Gimp, there are many 5 minute techniques for Gimp that PG just can't replicate.
For me, as both a non-artist and a Free Software developer, this app doesn't mean much, for some artists though, there is no doubt this is an important class of app on Linux and they should be trying this out.. now.
The "formatting codes" you're talking about in a typical technical document are much easier to work with than the brain-dead formatting you'll see in a typical Word document. While it is POSSIBLE to write good documents (using style, auto-numbering and proper section division techniques) in Word, it is very much more difficult than it should be, and so most people don't bother -- even technical writers. The technical review of some student work I did the other day found that they had multiple section 9.4.12s -- because they couldn't get Word to number things properly, so they typed the numbers by hand. This causes mayhem in the editing cycle. Now compare LaTeX's clean section numbering mechanism -- I've never seen anyone do it manually because the built-ins are much easier. Watch tech doc tools build an Index and compare it to the so-called "index" and contents pages from Word. Night and Day. So, whilst it's nice to have AbiWord or KWord (well, KWord is more FrameMaker than Word) for brief memos and two page layouts, LaTeX wins hands down for serious technical docs. Can anyone comment on the suitability of LyX for this task (and how its output meets the requirements of this new license)?
A gift, a gift from... a friend? the culture?, surely any reader is sharp enough to know why the Doctor is carrying such a blunt instrument as if it would protect her from all the wickedness in the world?
There's even an Ian M Banks story called "A gift from the culture" which makes sure you know what kind of protection a Culture citizen carries when she's alone in a strange land. Unlike the character in that story the Doctor has not rejected her citizenship, she's still firmly in possession of her technological birthright. I would have cried foul if a drone had arrived (why would a drone bore itself hiding on an uncontacted planet) but the knife is non-sentient, just a smart tool. She probably used it earlier on the two lads who sought to rape her, I haven't read it recently enough to be sure if that's likely.
Deus Ex Machina would be more appropriate if Jeffrey Archer pulled this stunt - should I also be surprised that she disappears in a locked room mystery when I already know there's several million tons of technology waiting in orbit (or is it even in orbit? A Contact vessel summoned to remove a threatened pawn could probably do locked room mysteries with its eyes firmly shut, a light year out of the system)