Well, it's a little more complicated than just "unbundling and removing" IE in this situation. I'd consider the Help system critical for system functioning for lots of users. It'd be totally inexcusable for Windows to not come with any Help just for the sake of deintegration. If they unbundled IE, they'd just have to write *another* HTML rendering engine and associated parts to handle the Help files. It'd probably be more buggy and even less standards-compliant.
On a side note, KDE does the same thing. I can open a "ms-its://" url to view.chm help files. If a bug was discovered in Konqueror's handling of ms-its urls that resulted in a security hole, would there be anyone claiming Konqueror shouldn't be part of KDE?
You're putting words in my mouth. I simply told you why I thought you were being modded down, and that it doesn't do much good to complain about it. Now, on to what you've shifted the discussion to.
I don't trust the moderators individually. A lot of them make bad decisions, this is true. That's true in ANY situation where you have a large number of people making decisions. However, as a group, I've found that they do a pretty good job. I did not insult you. I offered a suggestion, and you *attacked* me in response. You called me names and attacked my intelligence based on a 2 line post.
I *never said* most of the things you accuse me of saying or thinking. I never even commented on the substance of your comment, simply on your choice of presentation. I never said that it's impossible for OS X to have an NSA backdoor. It's improbable, and I believe that it doesn't have a backdoor, but I admit that it's entirely possible. You wanna know one reason why I don't think there's a backdoor? Because eventually that backdoor would be discovered, and that would be a PR disaster for Apple, and probably for the NSA as well, if they even care. If you'd like to hear more of my reasons, read my last paragraph.
I DON'T blindly trust big corporations, as you seem to imply based on... what? I judge the evidence, decide what I think is likely the situation, and act on that. We obviously have different standards and views, and you seem to think that mine deserve to be attacked. I don't have a Mac or any Apple products, and I don't have any "love" for Apple. I run Linux on Intel.
The IBM example you gave is very interesting. They had two choices in exporting Lotus Notes: Use 40 bit encryption (Legal for export), or make a deal with the NSA to use 64 bit encryption with 24 bits of the key known by the NSA. They made the second choice for marketing decisions. I'm not a cryptanalyst, so I'm just guessing here, but both options seem to offer similar encryption, no? It's no more of a "backdoor" than any software that follows US export restrictions on cryptography.
Okay, now for the reasons why I don't think OS X has a backdoor. These reasons aren't proof - the only possible complete proof is to look at the source code. However, they make the probability small enough to be acceptable for me.
1) Nobody's ever reported OS X "phoning home" to the NSA or any other gov. agency. 2) Apple's market share is ~2%, according to your post. I don't think that the NSA would take the risk of forcing Apple to include a backdoor for that kind of potential return. 3) A backdoor is theoretically useable by 3rd parties in addition to the NSA. Given the NSA's mission to make American computers *more* secure, a backdoor in OS X would be counterproductive.
Again, these are my reasons, and they may not mean anything to you or anyone else. If you disagree, that's nice. If you require absolute protection from NSA backdoors, use an open source OS. I recommend Linux.
Intelligent, rational prose? I'm sorry, but you come off as a paranoid lunatic. I'm not saying you are a paranoid lunatic, but that's the impression I get when I read your post.
Also, when you bitch about the moderation you receive, you're likely to get modded down even more. It's how the system works. Deal with it, or don't even bother posting.
Longhorn is planned to include development tools out of the box for.NET, The tools look to be pretty sweet, even if they are mostly clones of things like ant for.NET.
It gives me a better feeling than if he spent it on drugs and whores. Of course, given the option I'd rather that he didn't have the money in the first place. However, that's in the past, and not really something we can change.
There's a smoke-free initiative in my town, and my understanding is that it's not based on trying to "save" smokers or prevent them from doing what they want, but more that I can't walk to class without getting smoke blown in my face by idiots who're smoking on the street. That's a public nuissance, and potentially a public health hazard. I don't care if people want to smoke in their own homes, but lots can't even get the idea that their habit pisses off dozens of others when they do it in public.
It was a stunt that didn't go as planned. To claim that Timberlake "violently removed the clothing of the unwilling" Jackson is intentionally misrepresenting the facts to evoke an extremely negative emotional response. Don't do that.
Do I feel good if a gangster gives money to charity? Absolutely. I agree that it's not morally right for him to have all that money, and it's pretty clearly a calculated decision, but I don't personally think that his other actions mean that I shouldn't thank him for the good he does. I guess we fundamentally differ in opinion in that respect.
Why shouldn't he get any credit? He has the money, no one's arguing that. Isn't it better for him to give it to charities than hoard it for his personal use? He certainly *could* decide to not donate any. I think he deserves some credit for deciding that certain other people need money for noble goals, and giving some of the money he's earned. It doesn't really matter if he got the money by breaking antitrust law. It's still a charitable contribution which deserves credit.
Wow, you're cynical. How can you say that all the money that he's given to various chairities doesn't mean anything, and simultaneously condemn him for donating software? Yes, donating MS software is a marketing tactic. Get over it. He wants to donate software, and he's certainly not going to donate *competitor's* software! He's certainly not the most philanthropic person in history, but unless you've actually donated more money, don't call his contributions worthless.
By the way, most charities are run by lawyers. There's quite a few laws to be concerned with, many to prevent just what you're suggesting.
I'm probably gonna get flamed for this, but I use skins on Linux so my window manager, GTK1, GTK2, and Qt features all look at least similar. I'd prefer if they just standardized on one theme for all of them, and let the user change them individually only if they really wanted to.
Actually, most of the crashes I've had on my Unix-like system have brought down the system. If my video card driver crashes and kills X, which happens about once a week, that has effectively killed the system. Yes, I could ssh in and kill X and reset my consoles, but I've lost all my work already.
Sounds like you have a bad laptop. The "Designed for Microsoft Windows XP" sticker doesn't really mean much. It basically means that it has XP drivers, and comes with XP installed. My Inspiron has one too, and I ran both 2k and XP on it before I switched to Linux. I didn't notice any difference in uptimes. In both cases, they basically ran until I had to restart to install something. Over a year, each locked up maybe twice, always caused by shitty Dell video drivers.
Well, the actual article is so very vague about the electron beam that it's hard to infer exactly what he was talking about. My interpretation was that he was talking about using the electron beam to a pattern of dots on photographic paper. This sounds more like some exotic method of photography. The spinning disc technology was around, but he didn't connect it with electron beams and computers to predict what the Slashdot article talked about.
My problem with the whole thing is how the Slashbots *are* claiming he's Nostradamus. I'm sure that every time an article comes out that announces some new technology, there'll be some idiot who uses a creative interpretation of Vannevar Bush's words to claim that he predicted this 50 years ago. He had interesting ideas and was undoubtably extremely important in the early time of computer technology, but he wasn't *that* much of a visionary.
He's talking about using the kind of electron beam used inside a TV to write sales totals on a photograph card. Not really related.
I'm not really very impressed with this guy. He predicted a lot of solid ideas, but his implementations were short-sighted. He didn't predict the transistor, so his department-store cash register was based on punch cards and dry photographs.
All three tasks are related: one would want to rip a few CDs, make a play list, and then burn it-- all in one app.
One app... you mean like K3B
Yet when I point out th at K3B can only do one of those tasks, you get all pissed as if that's not at all what you said. It's not the "one app" that the poster was asking for.
I use an Intel8x0 integrated card with 2.6.3, and Alsa works relatively well. Every once in a while my SPDIF output gets muted somehow, but other than that it's pretty smooth.
First, the writeup on this article was horrible. This system is *not* doing away with shared libraries, or anything of the sort. There isn't going to be a copy of Qt in every KDE package. The only thing that the ROX system is doing is taking the config files, documentation, source code, executable, and associated files for a single app and putting them all in one unique folder heirarchy for that app. There are still shared libraries, and there are still ways for programs to access each other's config or shared data.
Second, the other part of the system, 0install, means that the user does not have to "futz" with the filesystem at all to install apps, if they don't want to. They just click the icon, and 0install downloads the program and any libraries it needs, copies them to the user's app folder, and runs them. If the user doesn't like the program, they can select it and hit delete, and it's gone.
There aren't any problems with the underlying system? Let's make a list.
All files for a given program spread out in 8 or 9 different directories.
Names like "/etc" instead of "Configuration" and "/usr/bin" instead of "/User/Applications", relics from when the majority of users preferred the command line.
Hardcoded paths in most programs that use this system make it very inflexible to change.
Difficult to manage more than one version of an application without modifying the application.
I'm sure you could also come up with a list of problems with ROX and 0install. No system is perfect for everybody. My point isn't that one is horrible and the other is perfect, just that for me and many others, the ROX way is better.
The GUI doesn't fix the problems with the underlying system, which is what 0install is trying to address. We only need apt because the average Linux filesystem is so spread out and grossly difficult to use that the user needs a suite of programs just to keep track of where each application's files live. Dependencies are another problem, but both apt and 0install handle that quite well.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it's a little more complicated than just "unbundling and removing" IE in this situation. I'd consider the Help system critical for system functioning for lots of users. It'd be totally inexcusable for Windows to not come with any Help just for the sake of deintegration. If they unbundled IE, they'd just have to write *another* HTML rendering engine and associated parts to handle the Help files. It'd probably be more buggy and even less standards-compliant.
.chm help files. If a bug was discovered in Konqueror's handling of ms-its urls that resulted in a security hole, would there be anyone claiming Konqueror shouldn't be part of KDE?
On a side note, KDE does the same thing. I can open a "ms-its://" url to view
It's okay, the jerk-effect seems to happen to a lot of people. Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
You're putting words in my mouth. I simply told you why I thought you were being modded down, and that it doesn't do much good to complain about it. Now, on to what you've shifted the discussion to.
I don't trust the moderators individually. A lot of them make bad decisions, this is true. That's true in ANY situation where you have a large number of people making decisions. However, as a group, I've found that they do a pretty good job. I did not insult you. I offered a suggestion, and you *attacked* me in response. You called me names and attacked my intelligence based on a 2 line post.
I *never said* most of the things you accuse me of saying or thinking. I never even commented on the substance of your comment, simply on your choice of presentation. I never said that it's impossible for OS X to have an NSA backdoor. It's improbable, and I believe that it doesn't have a backdoor, but I admit that it's entirely possible. You wanna know one reason why I don't think there's a backdoor? Because eventually that backdoor would be discovered, and that would be a PR disaster for Apple, and probably for the NSA as well, if they even care. If you'd like to hear more of my reasons, read my last paragraph.
I DON'T blindly trust big corporations, as you seem to imply based on... what? I judge the evidence, decide what I think is likely the situation, and act on that. We obviously have different standards and views, and you seem to think that mine deserve to be attacked. I don't have a Mac or any Apple products, and I don't have any "love" for Apple. I run Linux on Intel.
The IBM example you gave is very interesting. They had two choices in exporting Lotus Notes: Use 40 bit encryption (Legal for export), or make a deal with the NSA to use 64 bit encryption with 24 bits of the key known by the NSA. They made the second choice for marketing decisions. I'm not a cryptanalyst, so I'm just guessing here, but both options seem to offer similar encryption, no? It's no more of a "backdoor" than any software that follows US export restrictions on cryptography.
Okay, now for the reasons why I don't think OS X has a backdoor. These reasons aren't proof - the only possible complete proof is to look at the source code. However, they make the probability small enough to be acceptable for me.
1) Nobody's ever reported OS X "phoning home" to the NSA or any other gov. agency.
2) Apple's market share is ~2%, according to your post. I don't think that the NSA would take the risk of forcing Apple to include a backdoor for that kind of potential return.
3) A backdoor is theoretically useable by 3rd parties in addition to the NSA. Given the NSA's mission to make American computers *more* secure, a backdoor in OS X would be counterproductive.
Again, these are my reasons, and they may not mean anything to you or anyone else. If you disagree, that's nice. If you require absolute protection from NSA backdoors, use an open source OS. I recommend Linux.
Yes, this is the same feature that tried to convince me that my text files were of type "video/mpeg" and refused to open them in an editor.
Intelligent, rational prose? I'm sorry, but you come off as a paranoid lunatic. I'm not saying you are a paranoid lunatic, but that's the impression I get when I read your post.
Also, when you bitch about the moderation you receive, you're likely to get modded down even more. It's how the system works. Deal with it, or don't even bother posting.
Longhorn is planned to include development tools out of the box for .NET, The tools look to be pretty sweet, even if they are mostly clones of things like ant for .NET.
It gives me a better feeling than if he spent it on drugs and whores. Of course, given the option I'd rather that he didn't have the money in the first place. However, that's in the past, and not really something we can change.
That's why engineers should use calculators.
Remembering digits of pi means absolutely nothing to "mastering mathematics."
There's a smoke-free initiative in my town, and my understanding is that it's not based on trying to "save" smokers or prevent them from doing what they want, but more that I can't walk to class without getting smoke blown in my face by idiots who're smoking on the street. That's a public nuissance, and potentially a public health hazard. I don't care if people want to smoke in their own homes, but lots can't even get the idea that their habit pisses off dozens of others when they do it in public.
It was a stunt that didn't go as planned. To claim that Timberlake "violently removed the clothing of the unwilling" Jackson is intentionally misrepresenting the facts to evoke an extremely negative emotional response. Don't do that.
Do I feel good if a gangster gives money to charity? Absolutely. I agree that it's not morally right for him to have all that money, and it's pretty clearly a calculated decision, but I don't personally think that his other actions mean that I shouldn't thank him for the good he does. I guess we fundamentally differ in opinion in that respect.
Why shouldn't he get any credit? He has the money, no one's arguing that. Isn't it better for him to give it to charities than hoard it for his personal use? He certainly *could* decide to not donate any. I think he deserves some credit for deciding that certain other people need money for noble goals, and giving some of the money he's earned. It doesn't really matter if he got the money by breaking antitrust law. It's still a charitable contribution which deserves credit.
Wow, you're cynical. How can you say that all the money that he's given to various chairities doesn't mean anything, and simultaneously condemn him for donating software? Yes, donating MS software is a marketing tactic. Get over it. He wants to donate software, and he's certainly not going to donate *competitor's* software! He's certainly not the most philanthropic person in history, but unless you've actually donated more money, don't call his contributions worthless.
By the way, most charities are run by lawyers. There's quite a few laws to be concerned with, many to prevent just what you're suggesting.
I'm probably gonna get flamed for this, but I use skins on Linux so my window manager, GTK1, GTK2, and Qt features all look at least similar. I'd prefer if they just standardized on one theme for all of them, and let the user change them individually only if they really wanted to.
Actually, most of the crashes I've had on my Unix-like system have brought down the system. If my video card driver crashes and kills X, which happens about once a week, that has effectively killed the system. Yes, I could ssh in and kill X and reset my consoles, but I've lost all my work already.
Sounds like you have a bad laptop. The "Designed for Microsoft Windows XP" sticker doesn't really mean much. It basically means that it has XP drivers, and comes with XP installed. My Inspiron has one too, and I ran both 2k and XP on it before I switched to Linux. I didn't notice any difference in uptimes. In both cases, they basically ran until I had to restart to install something. Over a year, each locked up maybe twice, always caused by shitty Dell video drivers.
Well, the actual article is so very vague about the electron beam that it's hard to infer exactly what he was talking about. My interpretation was that he was talking about using the electron beam to a pattern of dots on photographic paper. This sounds more like some exotic method of photography. The spinning disc technology was around, but he didn't connect it with electron beams and computers to predict what the Slashdot article talked about.
My problem with the whole thing is how the Slashbots *are* claiming he's Nostradamus. I'm sure that every time an article comes out that announces some new technology, there'll be some idiot who uses a creative interpretation of Vannevar Bush's words to claim that he predicted this 50 years ago. He had interesting ideas and was undoubtably extremely important in the early time of computer technology, but he wasn't *that* much of a visionary.
He's talking about using the kind of electron beam used inside a TV to write sales totals on a photograph card. Not really related. I'm not really very impressed with this guy. He predicted a lot of solid ideas, but his implementations were short-sighted. He didn't predict the transistor, so his department-store cash register was based on punch cards and dry photographs.
K3B can't rip and encode music or make playlists.
I use an Intel8x0 integrated card with 2.6.3, and Alsa works relatively well. Every once in a while my SPDIF output gets muted somehow, but other than that it's pretty smooth.
First, the writeup on this article was horrible. This system is *not* doing away with shared libraries, or anything of the sort. There isn't going to be a copy of Qt in every KDE package. The only thing that the ROX system is doing is taking the config files, documentation, source code, executable, and associated files for a single app and putting them all in one unique folder heirarchy for that app. There are still shared libraries, and there are still ways for programs to access each other's config or shared data.
Second, the other part of the system, 0install, means that the user does not have to "futz" with the filesystem at all to install apps, if they don't want to. They just click the icon, and 0install downloads the program and any libraries it needs, copies them to the user's app folder, and runs them. If the user doesn't like the program, they can select it and hit delete, and it's gone.
There aren't any problems with the underlying system? Let's make a list.
I'm sure you could also come up with a list of problems with ROX and 0install. No system is perfect for everybody. My point isn't that one is horrible and the other is perfect, just that for me and many others, the ROX way is better.
The GUI doesn't fix the problems with the underlying system, which is what 0install is trying to address. We only need apt because the average Linux filesystem is so spread out and grossly difficult to use that the user needs a suite of programs just to keep track of where each application's files live. Dependencies are another problem, but both apt and 0install handle that quite well.
And all of these things will *eventually* have to be broken. It's necessary for progress. Yeah, it will break a lot of old software. Yeah, we'll deal.