This makes me think about those TCO studies that Microsoft likes to "sponsor".
They seem to be analyses that comprehend the exact time lapse that minimizes the licencing cost (just the time before you got to renew your Software Assurance subscription), and for sure this kind of "unplanned maintenance" has not been taken into account.
Although the authentication mechanism (A3/A8) is SIM implemented, and could be "easily" replaced, it seems that A5 for communications encryption is implemented by the handset (which has its sense due to limited SIM-card processing power). So, you're right, and I'm not defending whether the given algorithm is good or bad. Indeed they should have made it pluggable/downloadable too, but this kind of remote-code downloading and executing was far ahead of the time when the GSM standard was done (and they don't seem to look at this possibility for 3G either).
About competition, what I mean is that USA "makes its own standard" whenever a new international one is seeked. See what has happened to 3G too... -> incompatible handsets.
Actually I don't know how CDMA works, if it has any built-in encryption or frequency-hopping algorithm, or whether it's better than GSM or not. I only feel that the tendency shown by USA companies and institutions in this case is directed towards making it difficult for foreign equipment makers to compete in USA, rather than towards a better technology.
I simply don't buy it has anything to do with military radio band allocations or any other kind of legal radio band allocations having to be relocated.
The GSM mobile telephony system (used everywhere but except in USA and colonies, may God protect their industries from competition), does indeed support cryptography since its very design.
Not only that, but also a pseudo-random frequency hopping feature is also included in the scheme, so that recording a conversation from the radio waves in order to perform a later brute-force attack on it could be made impossible.
There are, however, several problems when coming down to reality in the application of the GSM standard:
The encryption mechanism isn't an end-to-end one; that is, it secures the handset to base-station link only, and for the rest of the communication path the voice/data travels in plain. The mechanism protects the user from radio eavesdropping only. GSM network land links and equipment must be secured by the operator. When having to tap a phone number, law enforcement organizations have to get the support of the operator, too, but probably insiders would be able to eavesdrop as much as they like.
Actually ciphering or frequency-hopping are optional features, and I think they're not used by most of the operators in Europe because of technical/cost, legal or political reasons. I know my GSM operator doesn't use them, at least at some cells. I know of cases where the available key-length has been artificially reduced because of political/legal concerns.
So, in a real world where the operator could be trusted and there weren't political restrictions about it, GSM could give the user privacy, but the fact is that it doesn't.
If the devices in the article provide end-to-end, user-controlled crytography, then they have their value indeed.
What if Longhorn does indeed provide more security, not only in default settings, but more inherently in the OpenSource?
Before the Internet appeared and before personal computers were so cheap, UNIX ran on big machines that a lot of people had to share. Since its origin it was a multiuser environment where many users could work and "live" at the same time. It was like lots of people living in a small city.
So it had to provide means to reduce to the minumum the probability for a bad user to enslave others or to take an unfair amount of resources that would leave the others without thir fair share. Thus UNIX has file and execute permissions, quota support, superuser account, and other restrictions buit in since the beginning.
The provided mechanisms may not be perfect, but they have been refined during 20 years (as Microsoft says, GNU/Linux is 80's technolohy; but someone invented the wheel even before that and we keep using it shamelessly) and their usage has got embedded into UNIX users' culture.
GNU/Linux inherits these UNIX security traditions.
By contrast, Microsoft operating systems started to get popular when cheap personal computers became available. Before the Internet boom, when these computers remained unconnected, only the ligitimate user would touch the machines, and so the operating systems could be single-user (even single-process, remember) entities that didn't have to care about security.
Now that with the Internet everything begins to be interconnected, you find that the user no longer operates in his/her own computer only. Now he/she has to live in the big big city formed by all the Internet-connected computers.
Microsoft added connectivity to their single-user OS's, but not the mechanisms to avoid bad-behaved Internet citizens from harming the legitimate user. They're trying to catch up. They added users and groups to Windows NT and have recently incorporated firewalls and things alike into their OSs.
But this is not a technical issue only. The Microsoft user and developer culture has still to catch up, and it can be a long time until it does, moreover when Microsoft is scaring people from upgrading to better versions with their insane prices.
As an example of the lack of security culture, take the example of Administrators, Advanced Users and Normal Users in Windows XP. It's supposed that Advanced Users could install programs, but I know of several cases in which the programs would refuse to install (or even run) if not using an Administrator account.
I think that it will take more than Longhorn's scheduled time to change users' and developers' minds...
For those that didn't notice, the "article" author is Rob Enderle.
He heads his own "consulting group", and has been very busy lately spreading this kind of Linux (zealots, IP robbers) vs non-Linux (very reasonable people) (Microsoft, of course).
Every one of the articles by Rob Enderle I've read shows the Free Software community in a not-so-subtle dark light.
Although he tries to sound reasonable (like other reasonable people, see), his arguments have less-than solid bases. That doesn't make them less dangerous to us. I fear lots of PHB's may be lured by the "reasonable" tone without deeply analyzing his points. This may be even worse if these PHB's have ever seen the "terrorist excitement" (non-PHB-understandable pleasure when WE control our software) that some of us may show sometimes;).
If he's not a paid liar, then he wants Free Software to be stopped in the tracks of mass adoption because he cannot understand the phylosophy or because he cannot "monetize" the technology. I don't know which of these variants makes him more pitiful to me.
About this particular article, and going to the main point... Where are the people between the "neutral group" that doesn't see Free Software as a mostly advantageous thing and the "priests" that choose to ignore the "truth" without any sense of responsibility?
So... The bottom line of the article is: "If you dare to freely admit that Free Software may be better, then you're a terrorist (zealot), or at best a blind irresponsible (priest)".
I have the same oppinion on TV emmissions today as the author of the parent post. In my country (Spain) watching TV is a good way to dumbify yourself or to succumb to the 15 minutes-commercials hypnosis.
If most of the people didn't resign themselves to the low quality and lack of imagination of the broadcasted media and got some other entertainment, things could change.
And I mean things changing in the media. The law of offer and demand would apply, so that the media would have to re-attract their consumers by offering new quality in their products.
However lots people (at least in my country) simply sits down watching whatever they show on the TV set because that's easier than thinking for a while in order to get themselves some proper entertainment. This way, indeed, demand is assured, and the media don't have to work hard at all. Here in Spain each channel only barely tries to marginally surpass each other's rubbish, standardizing on the lowest common denominator.
I guess lots of people will continue to consume that rubbish, even if the offered quality further decreases by means of annoying technical restrictions (stupid or not) to the use of the contents.
If people never react to this gradual degradation of their lives, then they truly deserve it.
The parent post may be seen as a righteous and sensible way to encourage those trying to impose new limitations to drop them. Worse goods should get less demand for them, not increased benefits to the "seller" (be the "purchaser" the TV watcher or the advertisement contractor).
And so... On what basis has the parent post been modded down? Perhaps because it's untechnical (Hey! It's a bit! Let's flip it!)? Perhaps because the moderator actually depends on watching TV for entertainment? I actually would like some enlightenment on this.
In order to Gaim 0.7[01] to compile and use the MSN plugin supporting the new MSN protocol, you have to install the proper development files for the Mozilla/Netscape security libraries (SSL support required by the new protocol).
SUSE systems also have mozilla development packages, but these are installed to non-standard locations, and you'll have to provide their locations to Gaim's configure script manually.
RedHat systems should behave mostly like Mandrake.
The referenced article has surprised me. Its writer seems to ignore or to have forgotten that the Linux kernel, as well as every GPL-distributed program, is clearly identified (as required by the license itself) as being so.
That means that anyone willing to build on GPL software does (or should do) knowing beforehand in which terms the derivative works may be distributed.
Nobody forced them to use the Linux kernel as the operating core of their product. They could have written their own, used another piece of Free Software with a less restrictive (BSD'ish) license, or licensed a proprietary one.
When they chose to use the Linux kernel, they implicitly agreed on the GPL terms; they got the code in exchange for some distribution obligations. It's almost the same about proprietary software; they would have got the code in exchange for some money.
So, what the FSF is enforcing is a contract implicitly accepted when distributing the embedded Linux kernel. No more, no less.
It's only that it seems easier to identify "stolen and hidden" code when it's Free Software than when it's some obscure and opaque proprietary counterpart. Cases of the latter have been seen, anyway. Just remember the Stac Electronics vs. Microsoft case.
Free Software developers that put their code under the GPL are just like proprietary developers. In both cases the code is "sold". The payment is the only thing that differs. GPL code is sold in exchange for continuous freedom for everybody, whereas proprietary software is sold in exchange for money.
It's the licenser's responsibility and choice to accept the price or not, and that's the point I'd like to make clear to the article author.
Regards,
Juan Jesus.
Don't trust share prices or firms as an oracle.
on
Merrill Lynch Rips Sun
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The most important thing to take into account is that the price of a company's shares is not really altered by reality, but by belief.
And it's good to look at the fact that it only reflects the beliefs of people who are geed-aware enough to trade shares. Most of these people are usually uninformed enough about reality as to trust the firm-provided analysts when they say things like that SCO's IP-blackmail business plan will be a complete boom.
See SCO's trades rising? That has nothing to do with reality, as anyone who recognize the nonsense in the phrase "I own UNIX" can tell.
Several financial firms seem to have already spoken about the "critical" and "wrong" situation of Sun Microsystems and exactly which percentage of layoffs they shall apply. Maybe they're right, but, as usual with analysts and their habit to work on none or little real information, I'd say they guess, as they do most of the time.
That is, if they're not actually trying to trigger some share-price-waves for their own benefit.
Personality leaks in the company may be a better indicator to use, and the fact that their upper layers are trying to ignore the Free Software/Open Source phenomenon (just like Microsoft did before; they no longer do; they now have a "Linux Chief" for a "Linux Strategy" consisting on destroying Linux) shows they have the same short sight that Microsoft did. However Microsoft has a lot of money from their dominant business, that buys them some time to try to react, whereas Sun may have not so much time left.
Will they want to see the lion running on them for a meal? I hope they'll do. But pretending to see the future would be behaving like all those financial analysts.
But if they go down in the end, I only hope Java gets open-sourced, rather than it getting bought by Microsoft in order to shut down the technology.
Some blurry details, no dates, and then the master stroke of "Windows will support it"... even quoting the name of a future, yet-to-be-written Microsoft extension.
Yes... the "source claims so"...
This seems to be only an stealth Intel move in order to discourage everybody from going on with AMD's already-available 64 bit offer, until they have some real reasonably priced 64 bit technology to sell.
Virtual folders are one of Evolution's neat features, which allow you to make such "dynamic link" classifications based on search criteria.
I'm too lazy to use them anyhow. The fact that the search feature in Evolution is what I would call "the Google in my email" also encourages me to be lazy.
In the end, I have two or three folders for a broad pre-classification. Then I use the efficient wonderful (easy, fast) function in Evolution to look for what I need.
Another possibility is that this is FUD.
on
Blaster Writer Caught
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Maybe the FBI is copying SCO's tactics here, probably pushed on by Microsoft too, who are the ones actually responsible and the ones trying to cover their back.
It could be that there isn't any 18 year old programmer, nor any witness either. It may be only a tactic to spread FUD among any potential future virus writers, so that they think "Hey! They've actually caught one virus writer. They could also catch me."
So... my particular conspiracy theory is that there's no one about to be caught, but that this FUD move would serve these purposes:
Make public oppinion think the FBI isn't helpless when fighting back virus writers (scapegoat for the FBI).
FUD potential future virus writers out of business, so hopefully reducing the efforts needed by Microsoft and the FBI in the future in this front.
Taking attention away from the fact that it's Microsoft fault to implement these "please don't hack me" security policies.
"...the choice of desktop between KDE, Gnome, IceWM etc, is not one that a former windows user, even a fairly technically competent one, is going to able to make an informed choice on, and that they should not be forced to make that choice in order to get good use out of any applications they might want to use."
A lot of people don't realize the fact that there's no choice being forced, actually.
Since major distributions (RedHat, Mandrake, etc...) began unifying the look & feel of the two main desktop environments (GNOME, KDE), and the developers of these environments began working together in order to improve the interoperability of the programs developed for both of them, I think things are getting better and better.
Users may run at the same time programs developed for GNOME and KDE and they'll work flawlessly together, so there's no actual need to choose.
Look & feel is the easiest issue to address; perhaps behaviour of widgets and applications (at least for these two major desktops) will keep converging; current efforts on HIGification and freedesktop.org seem to provide hope on this.
Unless someone writes some other abstraction layer that sits above both GNOME and KDE libraries, it's the developers the ones that are forced to choose... but this shouldn't be a thing to jeopardize desktop acceptation, however.
Only the main office applications (OpenOffice) remains, but Ximian has already done some work on it. It may be true that the issue isn't yet fully resolved, but we may be sure that, at least, the problem is fully understood and that there are competent people addressing it.
To be short... I'm convinced that we are on the right track, and that a home GNU/Linux desktop won't be a strange thing in some years.
Let's ask those pesky GNU/Linux developers to include a signed bootloader for Unixware in their ISO distributions or we will charge astronomical rates for ransom Unixware/binary Linux licences...
Yes, I know. Grub/Lilo allow Unixware to be booted too, but they aren't signed, so they don't count.
What do you know about the world? It seems to me that it's only what the mass media (mainly cartoons, probably) want you to believe.
Europe's not France alone.
Even French people eat more things than cheese and croissants, and drink more things than wine.
Sadly enough, corrupt politicians abound in every country. Yes, it's true. In yours too. Didn't you know?
Probably you don't know that smoking is forbidden in European flights.
Uhm... About bathing... yes it's true. After all, you didn't see any European bathing on the TV, did you?
About cramming people, yes, we have been here for a long time, and we got short of Indians to eject from their lands quite a while ago... so we have to adapt.
And, sadly again, it's true: some country's companies/government are far more skilled than European ones about de-stabilization techniques abroad.
Please... go read some real book. Some Europeans were able to write some of these some time ago. I would recommend Huxley's or Orwell's ones. Please, don't be misled by the fact that none of these two people were French. They were indeed Europeans, whether they thought of themselves in such terms or not.
with this and the 'European version' of GPS are we heading towards a future conflict across the Atlantic?
Hey! What's this?
It seems to me that this is a very American way of thinking (at least lately). What has been left unsaid is: 'Hey! Let's do some preventive war against the whole Europe, just in case they do develop an independent positioning system (obviously for guiding terrorist missiles) and we can't disable all their navigation-dependent systems just by pressing a button'.
Other countries' dependency on GPS is like having someone pointing a gun to our head. The gun holder may be your friend (now), but it feels still a little uncomfortable...
Moreover after seeing the latest samples of the American respect for international laws and treatises...
When I read the majority of the comments to this post I cannot help thinking that most of them are written by American people which have a very uniform way of thinking about it.
Not talking about "abstract" justice, or international legallity, which are after all "subjective" concepts, it seems reasonable for a given country to grab as many resources as it can to assure survival and power about other countries.
Huh! After all natural selection operates at country level too!
So, if this Iraq war thing were an intelligent move by George W. Bush to further empower his country, I'm sure a lot of other countries would be looking at the USA with envy about not having been able to so themselves first.
But, please, American people, don't piss off the rest of the world's intelligence. This whole war is about money for American companies. Stop telling us that this war has the idealistic goal of freeing Iraqi people and giving away a full new free country for them.
Unless... of course...
You actually think that the former claim is true, which, IMHO, would tell us mostly about intelligence in only one country.
Slashdot Mirror
Provide them with unfettered access to the project CVS :)
They seem to be analyses that comprehend the exact time lapse that minimizes the licencing cost (just the time before you got to renew your Software Assurance subscription), and for sure this kind of "unplanned maintenance" has not been taken into account.
No need for Netraft to onfirm this.
That's what I thought when I knew Microsoft had acquired the VirtualPC software. They kill two birds with one shot:
That was an evil idea myself could have devised, isn't it so, Minime?
About competition, what I mean is that USA "makes its own standard" whenever a new international one is seeked. See what has happened to 3G too... -> incompatible handsets.
Actually I don't know how CDMA works, if it has any built-in encryption or frequency-hopping algorithm, or whether it's better than GSM or not. I only feel that the tendency shown by USA companies and institutions in this case is directed towards making it difficult for foreign equipment makers to compete in USA, rather than towards a better technology.
I simply don't buy it has anything to do with military radio band allocations or any other kind of legal radio band allocations having to be relocated.
Not only that, but also a pseudo-random frequency hopping feature is also included in the scheme, so that recording a conversation from the radio waves in order to perform a later brute-force attack on it could be made impossible.
There are, however, several problems when coming down to reality in the application of the GSM standard:
So, in a real world where the operator could be trusted and there weren't political restrictions about it, GSM could give the user privacy, but the fact is that it doesn't.
If the devices in the article provide end-to-end, user-controlled crytography, then they have their value indeed.
Before the Internet appeared and before personal computers were so cheap, UNIX ran on big machines that a lot of people had to share. Since its origin it was a multiuser environment where many users could work and "live" at the same time. It was like lots of people living in a small city.
So it had to provide means to reduce to the minumum the probability for a bad user to enslave others or to take an unfair amount of resources that would leave the others without thir fair share. Thus UNIX has file and execute permissions, quota support, superuser account, and other restrictions buit in since the beginning.
The provided mechanisms may not be perfect, but they have been refined during 20 years (as Microsoft says, GNU/Linux is 80's technolohy; but someone invented the wheel even before that and we keep using it shamelessly) and their usage has got embedded into UNIX users' culture.
GNU/Linux inherits these UNIX security traditions.
By contrast, Microsoft operating systems started to get popular when cheap personal computers became available. Before the Internet boom, when these computers remained unconnected, only the ligitimate user would touch the machines, and so the operating systems could be single-user (even single-process, remember) entities that didn't have to care about security.
Now that with the Internet everything begins to be interconnected, you find that the user no longer operates in his/her own computer only. Now he/she has to live in the big big city formed by all the Internet-connected computers.
Microsoft added connectivity to their single-user OS's, but not the mechanisms to avoid bad-behaved Internet citizens from harming the legitimate user. They're trying to catch up. They added users and groups to Windows NT and have recently incorporated firewalls and things alike into their OSs.
But this is not a technical issue only. The Microsoft user and developer culture has still to catch up, and it can be a long time until it does, moreover when Microsoft is scaring people from upgrading to better versions with their insane prices.
As an example of the lack of security culture, take the example of Administrators, Advanced Users and Normal Users in Windows XP. It's supposed that Advanced Users could install programs, but I know of several cases in which the programs would refuse to install (or even run) if not using an Administrator account.
I think that it will take more than Longhorn's scheduled time to change users' and developers' minds...
He heads his own "consulting group", and has been very busy lately spreading this kind of Linux (zealots, IP robbers) vs non-Linux (very reasonable people) (Microsoft, of course).
Every one of the articles by Rob Enderle I've read shows the Free Software community in a not-so-subtle dark light.
Although he tries to sound reasonable (like other reasonable people, see), his arguments have less-than solid bases. That doesn't make them less dangerous to us. I fear lots of PHB's may be lured by the "reasonable" tone without deeply analyzing his points. This may be even worse if these PHB's have ever seen the "terrorist excitement" (non-PHB-understandable pleasure when WE control our software) that some of us may show sometimes ;).
If he's not a paid liar, then he wants Free Software to be stopped in the tracks of mass adoption because he cannot understand the phylosophy or because he cannot "monetize" the technology. I don't know which of these variants makes him more pitiful to me.
About this particular article, and going to the main point... Where are the people between the "neutral group" that doesn't see Free Software as a mostly advantageous thing and the "priests" that choose to ignore the "truth" without any sense of responsibility?
So... The bottom line of the article is: "If you dare to freely admit that Free Software may be better, then you're a terrorist (zealot), or at best a blind irresponsible (priest)".
If most of the people didn't resign themselves to the low quality and lack of imagination of the broadcasted media and got some other entertainment, things could change.
And I mean things changing in the media. The law of offer and demand would apply, so that the media would have to re-attract their consumers by offering new quality in their products.
However lots people (at least in my country) simply sits down watching whatever they show on the TV set because that's easier than thinking for a while in order to get themselves some proper entertainment. This way, indeed, demand is assured, and the media don't have to work hard at all. Here in Spain each channel only barely tries to marginally surpass each other's rubbish, standardizing on the lowest common denominator.
I guess lots of people will continue to consume that rubbish, even if the offered quality further decreases by means of annoying technical restrictions (stupid or not) to the use of the contents.
If people never react to this gradual degradation of their lives, then they truly deserve it.
The parent post may be seen as a righteous and sensible way to encourage those trying to impose new limitations to drop them. Worse goods should get less demand for them, not increased benefits to the "seller" (be the "purchaser" the TV watcher or the advertisement contractor).
And so... On what basis has the parent post been modded down? Perhaps because it's untechnical (Hey! It's a bit! Let's flip it!)? Perhaps because the moderator actually depends on watching TV for entertainment? I actually would like some enlightenment on this.
Please see this comment.
In my Mandrake 9.0 system, the packages are:
SUSE systems also have mozilla development packages, but these are installed to non-standard locations, and you'll have to provide their locations to Gaim's configure script manually.RedHat systems should behave mostly like Mandrake.
Dear gentlemen,
The referenced article has surprised me. Its writer seems to ignore or to have forgotten that the Linux kernel, as well as every GPL-distributed program, is clearly identified (as required by the license itself) as being so.
That means that anyone willing to build on GPL software does (or should do) knowing beforehand in which terms the derivative works may be distributed.
Nobody forced them to use the Linux kernel as the operating core of their product. They could have written their own, used another piece of Free Software with a less restrictive (BSD'ish) license, or licensed a proprietary one.
When they chose to use the Linux kernel, they implicitly agreed on the GPL terms; they got the code in exchange for some distribution obligations. It's almost the same about proprietary software; they would have got the code in exchange for some money.
So, what the FSF is enforcing is a contract implicitly accepted when distributing the embedded Linux kernel. No more, no less.
It's only that it seems easier to identify "stolen and hidden" code when it's Free Software than when it's some obscure and opaque proprietary counterpart. Cases of the latter have been seen, anyway. Just remember the Stac Electronics vs. Microsoft case.
Free Software developers that put their code under the GPL are just like proprietary developers. In both cases the code is "sold". The payment is the only thing that differs. GPL code is sold in exchange for continuous freedom for everybody, whereas proprietary software is sold in exchange for money.
It's the licenser's responsibility and choice to accept the price or not, and that's the point I'd like to make clear to the article author.
Regards,
Juan Jesus.
And it's good to look at the fact that it only reflects the beliefs of people who are geed-aware enough to trade shares. Most of these people are usually uninformed enough about reality as to trust the firm-provided analysts when they say things like that SCO's IP-blackmail business plan will be a complete boom.
See SCO's trades rising? That has nothing to do with reality, as anyone who recognize the nonsense in the phrase "I own UNIX" can tell.
Several financial firms seem to have already spoken about the "critical" and "wrong" situation of Sun Microsystems and exactly which percentage of layoffs they shall apply. Maybe they're right, but, as usual with analysts and their habit to work on none or little real information, I'd say they guess, as they do most of the time.
That is, if they're not actually trying to trigger some share-price-waves for their own benefit.
Personality leaks in the company may be a better indicator to use, and the fact that their upper layers are trying to ignore the Free Software/Open Source phenomenon (just like Microsoft did before; they no longer do; they now have a "Linux Chief" for a "Linux Strategy" consisting on destroying Linux) shows they have the same short sight that Microsoft did. However Microsoft has a lot of money from their dominant business, that buys them some time to try to react, whereas Sun may have not so much time left.
Will they want to see the lion running on them for a meal? I hope they'll do. But pretending to see the future would be behaving like all those financial analysts.
But if they go down in the end, I only hope Java gets open-sourced, rather than it getting bought by Microsoft in order to shut down the technology.
Yes... the "source claims so"...
This seems to be only an stealth Intel move in order to discourage everybody from going on with AMD's already-available 64 bit offer, until they have some real reasonably priced 64 bit technology to sell.
Yeah! This is one of the few human-machine interface methods that remained to be invented: being able to control things... with your butt!
Then the crash recorder data could be used to iron out any remaining bugs. :)
And... yes, the beta program should include some MS-like EULA... :P
I'm too lazy to use them anyhow. The fact that the search feature in Evolution is what I would call "the Google in my email" also encourages me to be lazy.
In the end, I have two or three folders for a broad pre-classification. Then I use the efficient wonderful (easy, fast) function in Evolution to look for what I need.
It could be that there isn't any 18 year old programmer, nor any witness either. It may be only a tactic to spread FUD among any potential future virus writers, so that they think "Hey! They've actually caught one virus writer. They could also catch me."
So... my particular conspiracy theory is that there's no one about to be caught, but that this FUD move would serve these purposes:
A lot of people don't realize the fact that there's no choice being forced, actually.
Since major distributions (RedHat, Mandrake, etc...) began unifying the look & feel of the two main desktop environments (GNOME, KDE), and the developers of these environments began working together in order to improve the interoperability of the programs developed for both of them, I think things are getting better and better.
Users may run at the same time programs developed for GNOME and KDE and they'll work flawlessly together, so there's no actual need to choose.
Look & feel is the easiest issue to address; perhaps behaviour of widgets and applications (at least for these two major desktops) will keep converging; current efforts on HIGification and freedesktop.org seem to provide hope on this.
Unless someone writes some other abstraction layer that sits above both GNOME and KDE libraries, it's the developers the ones that are forced to choose... but this shouldn't be a thing to jeopardize desktop acceptation, however.
Only the main office applications (OpenOffice) remains, but Ximian has already done some work on it. It may be true that the issue isn't yet fully resolved, but we may be sure that, at least, the problem is fully understood and that there are competent people addressing it.
To be short... I'm convinced that we are on the right track, and that a home GNU/Linux desktop won't be a strange thing in some years.
Let's ask those pesky GNU/Linux developers to include a signed bootloader for Unixware in their ISO distributions or we will charge astronomical rates for ransom Unixware/binary Linux licences...
Yes, I know. Grub/Lilo allow Unixware to be booted too, but they aren't signed, so they don't count.
Did they take into account the Doppler effect?
10 s at 15 G will make up for an ending speed of 1470 m/s.
This will make the frequency received drop some 11 kHz at the maximum speed when using the corrector factor (c / (c + v))...
I suppose this is not a so critical variation, anyway...
Uhm... Did you figure it out because of the login name? ;)
What do you know about the world? It seems to me that it's only what the mass media (mainly cartoons, probably) want you to believe.
Please... go read some real book. Some Europeans were able to write some of these some time ago. I would recommend Huxley's or Orwell's ones. Please, don't be misled by the fact that none of these two people were French. They were indeed Europeans, whether they thought of themselves in such terms or not.
with this and the 'European version' of GPS are we heading towards a future conflict across the Atlantic?
Hey! What's this?
It seems to me that this is a very American way of thinking (at least lately). What has been left unsaid is: 'Hey! Let's do some preventive war against the whole Europe, just in case they do develop an independent positioning system (obviously for guiding terrorist missiles) and we can't disable all their navigation-dependent systems just by pressing a button'.
Other countries' dependency on GPS is like having someone pointing a gun to our head. The gun holder may be your friend (now), but it feels still a little uncomfortable...
Moreover after seeing the latest samples of the American respect for international laws and treatises...
Not talking about "abstract" justice, or international legallity, which are after all "subjective" concepts, it seems reasonable for a given country to grab as many resources as it can to assure survival and power about other countries.
Huh! After all natural selection operates at country level too!
So, if this Iraq war thing were an intelligent move by George W. Bush to further empower his country, I'm sure a lot of other countries would be looking at the USA with envy about not having been able to so themselves first.
But, please, American people, don't piss off the rest of the world's intelligence. This whole war is about money for American companies. Stop telling us that this war has the idealistic goal of freeing Iraqi people and giving away a full new free country for them.
Unless... of course...
You actually think that the former claim is true, which, IMHO, would tell us mostly about intelligence in only one country.