I always see people saying this, but it doesn't really seem to help. We've still had kernel vulnerabilities and exploits. How many people are really looking at the source? It's not like the whole world suddenly is poring through all the code--it's still a core group of hackers, just like at any company.
Microsoft licenses Windows source code out to many companies and universities. They have probably just as many "eyes."
Is that why Slashdot reported that Linux was the most breached operating system on the Internet?
Slashbots will remember things from eight years ago like Windows blue-screens, but conveniently forgot a study that points out the flaws in Linux posted not two months ago.
To say Linux will "always" beat Windows, when Linux is #1 in breaches, reaks of blind fanboyism. Let's accept what is.
And every time I see you use the phrase "we" in a post like this it makes me wonder just what you mean by that since you have never had one positive thing to say about Unix/Linux/Open Source here on Slashdot. The only positive things you have to say concern MS and Apple--anything that is noncommercial and free is shit in your opinion--so just what do you mean by "we"?
Ignoring the fact that it's a complete and utter lie--I've said plenty of good things about both Linux, BSD, and the OSS philosophy in general--one wonder what exactly is so bad about possibly having good things to say about Microsoft and Apple. Your response has only served to prove my point.
We've known since 1998 that Linux has server headway. Microsoft knows this too. They know they have to work on security (hence what's coming in SP2 and later on, Longhorn).
Summary of article--Linux is a good server, Microsoft has to make Windows more secure to compete (this despite the fact Linux was shown to be the most vulnerable OS on the net according to an article Slashdot posted a few months ago).
Only on Slashdot is an entire article posted about the command line being the "best newbie interface." The rest of the modern, non-UNIX-obsessed computing world laughs in response. Riiiight...the command-line is the best interface for newbies...
This article was only posted to make Linux users feel better about the fact that 80% of setting up and using Linux still requires using arcane commands. So we get articles claiming "in my experience, the command line is better for newbies than a visual interface." That way, when people bring up the overly complicated command line routines, Linux people can say, "But the command line is better for newbies anyway!" And it gives assholes more of a reason to answer every single newbie question with "read the man pages."
It's groupthink holding things back. Look, there's nothing wrong with just admitting that things aren't quite there yet for newbies when it comes to Linux. We're getting there, but this silly let's-justify-20-year-old-UNIX-philosophy is holding it back.
No, this is why the GPL is MORE free than BSD style licenses- because the changes made to them will remain free as well. Freedom that can be taken away at someone else's whim is not free.
But you're taking away someone's freedom by dictating how they use your software. How is something MORE free by forcing someone to not freely do what they want? Your definition of freedom is to, in essence, "force freedom" on someone else. You're using freedom as a loaded word meaning to restrict the use of the software in a way that you're only allowed to use it unless you restrict other people's use of it, and so forth.
Its like claiming we'd be more free if the government could take away our right to free speech or public assembly at will.
What a hair-brained analogy. You're talking about a government RESTRICTING what someone does--just like the GPL--when the BSD license lets you do whatever you want. The better analogy of yours would be the government forcing everybody to reveal something about their product, while a free government would let the people choose whether or not to reveal that something about their product.
Am I the only one who thinks, instead of getting together to discuss "legal issues" and "licenses," maybe people should be getting together to, I don't know, discuss furthering the Linux desktop movement through some sort of unification effort?
This SCO thing will blow over. The real world expects results, not some licensing meeting between old UNIX hackers. I'd rather they be drawing up designs for an innovative desktop.
Someone stringing random adjectives together as if it proves a point--i.e., "ROTK Uberextended Super Ubiquitious Edition"--even though it's always just been standard and extended editions and has always been stated such since 2001.
People replying to the above guy explaining, "well at least they've been upfront about it." In every single LOTR DVD article, people have to re-explain this fact. Is there any particular reason it's not common knowledge by now, three years after the trilogies have been coming out this way on DVD?
Several comments from people who express how "disappointing" ROTK was to them.
Replies to the above guy, all beginning with "I thought I was the only one who thought..."
After the release of The Hobbit, by that time CG should have improved dramatically.
Peter Jackson should use the opportunity to re-render certain scenes from the previous two movies. For instance, redo Gollum in FOTR using the new Gollum model (something he's already stated he'd like to do) and fixing a bunch of Gollum's movements to make him look more realistic (he fits into the scenes, but sometimes he still looks very clearly inserted and not real). Also, redo the Wargs and Ent attackfrom The Two Towers--they look like ass (and Peter Jackson agrees, if you listen to the audio commentary...those scenes were rushed at the last minute).
By the time this imaginary box set happens, the new high-definition DVD format should be out allowing four times current resolution...imagine zooming in just to examine Gollum's skin shaders. *geekgasm*
I should note that I am not at all surprised someone smoking crack modded me down as "Troll." What makes Linux so great that it's above criticism? XFree86 for that matter? Here on Slashdot, if you dare criticize something and hold a differing opinion than the majority, you get modded down.
I'll take your post point-by-point.
1. Just because something is 20+ years old, it doesn't mean it should be thrown away.
If you had bothered to RTFP (read the fucking paper) I linked to, you'd see *exactly* why using that 20+ year old X technology is a bad idea.
Plenty of people like the idea of heirarchical filesystems. Plenty of people like mice, monitors and keyboards. Plenty of people like icons and windows.
I have no idea why you're bringing all that up. Those are abstract concepts and ideas, like the idea of books, pages, and chapters. I never mentioned anything about those.
The X protocol in current use isn't 20 years old. It's matured and gone through a number of revisions, just like any other technology.
The X protocol *is* 20 years old. It supports extensions really well. As the paper outlines, many of these extensions are breaking other extensions. A typical desktop runs about 26 extensions. Not to mention that adding certain graphical effects requires changing a lot of architecture in the source code because of the way XFree86 is set up.
2. If you are advocating a single desktop that runs on Linux, I guess you want to get rid of FreeBSD etc?
Port it to BSD if you want. That's not even a relevant issue to what I was talking about--removing this silly desktop "competition" going on between competing products, completely scaring away any serious company wanting to write an app for X. Who do you write for? GTK? QT? Motif?
3. What happens when the desktop project starts being unreasonable?
What if both GNOME and KDE become unreasonable? You can't argue with a "what if" because it could apply to absolutely anything. You haven't even defined what you mean by "unreasonable."
The only reason we aren't all stuck with XFree's tantrums is that competing projects like fd.o give users leverage.
It's a fork of XFree86. It still has its tantrums. X doesn't even have its own widget set. The issues with X are much more fundamental than you are discussing here.
Do you really think that the XFree team would have backed down on the license change if they didn't think everybody would switch away?
What does the license have to do with anything? I'm talking technologically and logically--XFree86 needs to be gone, and the two competing desktops need to get their acts together. All these incompatible toolkits have driven away serious desktop development all in the name of "choice."
4. There's no clear "winner". KDE and GNOME have different design goals, and lots of people agree with KDE's set of design goals, and lots of people agree with GNOME's design goals. You'll never get consensus, and you don't provide a reason for getting rid of one of them.
Application support. There. Which one should Adobe port Photoshop to? If we had one seamless desktop with proper binary installation/uninstallation routines and a sane programming library that retained backwards-compatibility with each major release, you don't think companies would take a look?
5. You state that X/KDE/GNOME are dead in the water, when in fact they are moving along at a rapid pace, and then point to Y, something that is barely out of the vapourware phase.
Vaporware? You can already download it and compile. Developers are writing the base widget set as I type this. I don't get this bizarre aversion to change that Linux users have.
6. You state "we should be focusing all of our efforts...". Exactly what effort are you focusing? Or are you just an armchair know-it-all?
Here's why. We need to get away from this obsession with 20+ year old graphics servers running 20 different inconsistent toolkits, all working extra hard to "work well with each other" when we should really be focusing our efforts on one major desktop competitor running on Linux.
KDE is interested in adding 2,000 new sidebar buttons and Control Center options. Gnome is interested in, instead of a big giant "K," having an Applications menu and an Actions menu.
Gnome should have been the interface project, and KDE the application framework project. Instead, we have one desktop environment trying to be Windows, the other MacOS.
Because, moron, it has nothing to do with Quartz Extreme or OpenGL. They're hardware-accelerating their desktop with DirectX.
Whoever modded you as "Interesting" is a moron. That's like randomly claiming someone stole intellectual property without any proof or reason to believe so...in other words, you're acting like SCO.
Perhaps Windows 98 had the better error detection and so would lockup instead of continuing to run.
I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want my operating system to keep on running on a faulty motherboard without telling me anything was wrong or behaving differently in any way. That just tells me the operating system has no idea what is going on. It's not unlikely that Windows 98 would encounter a fatal error in your motherboard and lock up, unwilling to risk data loss or memory corruption. You're telling me Linux would keep on running? I'd be scared for my data.
If a company has to write 2 drivers, which one are they more likely to spend time writing and testing properly: the one that will be used on 95% of desktops or the one that will be used on 5% of desktops?
Neither--there are plenty of extremely poorly-written drivers for the "95% of desktops" that is Windows. For years, even ATI itself was crash-worthy. Get real.
But see, that's what would make it so great. I bet Peter Jackson would treat the ring whimsically, but have some sort of strange moment of hesitation on Bilbo's part at some point, some strange look, and a slight bit of the theme of the ring--you'd sit there thinking, oh, man, there it is, the cause of the whole huge story about to happen later on. And then the movie ignores it for the rest of the film. It would make Fellowship resonate all the more.
As an aside, think of how incredibly awesome the introduction of Gollum would be, him in his cave swimming up behind Bilbo's back. The audience will go nuts when Gollum appears again in theaters.
There's no way Holm can pass for that sort of age any more!
Uh, he did already, in Fellowship of the Ring. I'd be very surprised if they used a different actor for Bilbo. What's going to happen when you finish watching the Hobbit and then go into Fellowship and see that prologue? Ian Holm's gonna be the one stumbling across the ring in Gollum's cave. He's gonna be the one greeting Gandalf at Bag-End in the beginning. And he's the one Gandalf is going to say "hasn't aged a day."
Christopher Lee is like 82 freaking years old. If he can last three 3-hour movies playing an evil wizard, I think Ian Holm can stand to be a nervous little burglar running around invisibly.
Also each story gets more detailed as time progresses, very much like the Bible as well.
This was intentional. The history of Middle-Earth follows the same kind of mythological histories of our real world, in which the very early past is abstract and highly fantastical, and as time progresses elements become more historically grounded. Tolkien had studied the mythologies of real ancient civilizations and seemed to model the same sort of progression of tone in their histories.
Lord of the Rings symbolizes the passing of the Elves and the growing dominance of man, and therefore the passing of mythology and the growing dominance of literal history. In that way, it can very much be seen as like the Bible. The god of Middle-Earth was pretty active in the early days, and things were very mythological (the world was flat until it was violently curved), and by the time the Third Age rolls around, the god is non-existent in daily life, and magic is sort of a fading thing along with the Elves.
...allowing them to go back and redo the Gollum and other CG shots (Warg attack, anyone?) that weren't quite there yet but were damn close, and repackage them all in a super quadrilogy set.
Some people may wonder why SP2 will be so huge of a download when it comes out. The reason is that not only have they introduced the features outlined previously, but they have recompiled many of their core system files using the latest Visual Studio and its detection in order to further remove possible exploits and overflows.
I'm looking forward to SP2 more than I was looking forward to SP1.
Longhorn was never "postponed." They never gave a release date. Originally they were targetting late 2005, then said they would target early 2006, and haven't said a word since.
My favorite thing is when Slashdotters call it "vaporware."
Slashdot Mirror
I always see people saying this, but it doesn't really seem to help. We've still had kernel vulnerabilities and exploits. How many people are really looking at the source? It's not like the whole world suddenly is poring through all the code--it's still a core group of hackers, just like at any company.
Microsoft licenses Windows source code out to many companies and universities. They have probably just as many "eyes."
Is that why Slashdot reported that Linux was the most breached operating system on the Internet?
Slashbots will remember things from eight years ago like Windows blue-screens, but conveniently forgot a study that points out the flaws in Linux posted not two months ago.
To say Linux will "always" beat Windows, when Linux is #1 in breaches, reaks of blind fanboyism. Let's accept what is.
And every time I see you use the phrase "we" in a post like this it makes me wonder just what you mean by that since you have never had one positive thing to say about Unix/Linux/Open Source here on Slashdot. The only positive things you have to say concern MS and Apple--anything that is noncommercial and free is shit in your opinion--so just what do you mean by "we"?
Ignoring the fact that it's a complete and utter lie--I've said plenty of good things about both Linux, BSD, and the OSS philosophy in general--one wonder what exactly is so bad about possibly having good things to say about Microsoft and Apple. Your response has only served to prove my point.
We've known since 1998 that Linux has server headway. Microsoft knows this too. They know they have to work on security (hence what's coming in SP2 and later on, Longhorn).
Summary of article--Linux is a good server, Microsoft has to make Windows more secure to compete (this despite the fact Linux was shown to be the most vulnerable OS on the net according to an article Slashdot posted a few months ago).
Slashdot already reported this last week. How SCO was spinning the breach of contract money as a Linux license.
Nintendo didn't consider it a fad. They just wanted faster and cheaper. No load times.
Only on Slashdot is an entire article posted about the command line being the "best newbie interface." The rest of the modern, non-UNIX-obsessed computing world laughs in response. Riiiight...the command-line is the best interface for newbies...
This article was only posted to make Linux users feel better about the fact that 80% of setting up and using Linux still requires using arcane commands. So we get articles claiming "in my experience, the command line is better for newbies than a visual interface." That way, when people bring up the overly complicated command line routines, Linux people can say, "But the command line is better for newbies anyway!" And it gives assholes more of a reason to answer every single newbie question with "read the man pages."
It's groupthink holding things back. Look, there's nothing wrong with just admitting that things aren't quite there yet for newbies when it comes to Linux. We're getting there, but this silly let's-justify-20-year-old-UNIX-philosophy is holding it back.
No, this is why the GPL is MORE free than BSD style licenses- because the changes made to them will remain free as well. Freedom that can be taken away at someone else's whim is not free.
But you're taking away someone's freedom by dictating how they use your software. How is something MORE free by forcing someone to not freely do what they want? Your definition of freedom is to, in essence, "force freedom" on someone else. You're using freedom as a loaded word meaning to restrict the use of the software in a way that you're only allowed to use it unless you restrict other people's use of it, and so forth.
Its like claiming we'd be more free if the government could take away our right to free speech or public assembly at will.
What a hair-brained analogy. You're talking about a government RESTRICTING what someone does--just like the GPL--when the BSD license lets you do whatever you want. The better analogy of yours would be the government forcing everybody to reveal something about their product, while a free government would let the people choose whether or not to reveal that something about their product.
Am I the only one who thinks, instead of getting together to discuss "legal issues" and "licenses," maybe people should be getting together to, I don't know, discuss furthering the Linux desktop movement through some sort of unification effort?
This SCO thing will blow over. The real world expects results, not some licensing meeting between old UNIX hackers. I'd rather they be drawing up designs for an innovative desktop.
After the release of The Hobbit, by that time CG should have improved dramatically.
Peter Jackson should use the opportunity to re-render certain scenes from the previous two movies. For instance, redo Gollum in FOTR using the new Gollum model (something he's already stated he'd like to do) and fixing a bunch of Gollum's movements to make him look more realistic (he fits into the scenes, but sometimes he still looks very clearly inserted and not real). Also, redo the Wargs and Ent attackfrom The Two Towers--they look like ass (and Peter Jackson agrees, if you listen to the audio commentary...those scenes were rushed at the last minute).
By the time this imaginary box set happens, the new high-definition DVD format should be out allowing four times current resolution...imagine zooming in just to examine Gollum's skin shaders. *geekgasm*
I should note that I am not at all surprised someone smoking crack modded me down as "Troll." What makes Linux so great that it's above criticism? XFree86 for that matter? Here on Slashdot, if you dare criticize something and hold a differing opinion than the majority, you get modded down.
I'll take your post point-by-point.
1. Just because something is 20+ years old, it doesn't mean it should be thrown away.
If you had bothered to RTFP (read the fucking paper) I linked to, you'd see *exactly* why using that 20+ year old X technology is a bad idea.
Plenty of people like the idea of heirarchical filesystems. Plenty of people like mice, monitors and keyboards. Plenty of people like icons and windows.
I have no idea why you're bringing all that up. Those are abstract concepts and ideas, like the idea of books, pages, and chapters. I never mentioned anything about those.
The X protocol in current use isn't 20 years old. It's matured and gone through a number of revisions, just like any other technology.
The X protocol *is* 20 years old. It supports extensions really well. As the paper outlines, many of these extensions are breaking other extensions. A typical desktop runs about 26 extensions. Not to mention that adding certain graphical effects requires changing a lot of architecture in the source code because of the way XFree86 is set up.
2. If you are advocating a single desktop that runs on Linux, I guess you want to get rid of FreeBSD etc?
Port it to BSD if you want. That's not even a relevant issue to what I was talking about--removing this silly desktop "competition" going on between competing products, completely scaring away any serious company wanting to write an app for X. Who do you write for? GTK? QT? Motif?
3. What happens when the desktop project starts being unreasonable?
What if both GNOME and KDE become unreasonable? You can't argue with a "what if" because it could apply to absolutely anything. You haven't even defined what you mean by "unreasonable."
The only reason we aren't all stuck with XFree's tantrums is that competing projects like fd.o give users leverage.
It's a fork of XFree86. It still has its tantrums. X doesn't even have its own widget set. The issues with X are much more fundamental than you are discussing here.
Do you really think that the XFree team would have backed down on the license change if they didn't think everybody would switch away?
What does the license have to do with anything? I'm talking technologically and logically--XFree86 needs to be gone, and the two competing desktops need to get their acts together. All these incompatible toolkits have driven away serious desktop development all in the name of "choice."
4. There's no clear "winner". KDE and GNOME have different design goals, and lots of people agree with KDE's set of design goals, and lots of people agree with GNOME's design goals. You'll never get consensus, and you don't provide a reason for getting rid of one of them.
Application support. There. Which one should Adobe port Photoshop to? If we had one seamless desktop with proper binary installation/uninstallation routines and a sane programming library that retained backwards-compatibility with each major release, you don't think companies would take a look?
5. You state that X/KDE/GNOME are dead in the water, when in fact they are moving along at a rapid pace, and then point to Y, something that is barely out of the vapourware phase.
Vaporware? You can already download it and compile. Developers are writing the base widget set as I type this. I don't get this bizarre aversion to change that Linux users have.
6. You state "we should be focusing all of our efforts...". Exactly what effort are you focusing? Or are you just an armchair know-it-all?
I'm currently writing a design paper. Sto
Here's why. We need to get away from this obsession with 20+ year old graphics servers running 20 different inconsistent toolkits, all working extra hard to "work well with each other" when we should really be focusing our efforts on one major desktop competitor running on Linux.
KDE is interested in adding 2,000 new sidebar buttons and Control Center options. Gnome is interested in, instead of a big giant "K," having an Applications menu and an Actions menu.
Gnome should have been the interface project, and KDE the application framework project. Instead, we have one desktop environment trying to be Windows, the other MacOS.
Because, moron, it has nothing to do with Quartz Extreme or OpenGL. They're hardware-accelerating their desktop with DirectX.
Whoever modded you as "Interesting" is a moron. That's like randomly claiming someone stole intellectual property without any proof or reason to believe so...in other words, you're acting like SCO.
Perhaps Windows 98 had the better error detection and so would lockup instead of continuing to run.
I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want my operating system to keep on running on a faulty motherboard without telling me anything was wrong or behaving differently in any way. That just tells me the operating system has no idea what is going on. It's not unlikely that Windows 98 would encounter a fatal error in your motherboard and lock up, unwilling to risk data loss or memory corruption. You're telling me Linux would keep on running? I'd be scared for my data.
If a company has to write 2 drivers, which one are they more likely to spend time writing and testing properly: the one that will be used on 95% of desktops or the one that will be used on 5% of desktops?
Neither--there are plenty of extremely poorly-written drivers for the "95% of desktops" that is Windows. For years, even ATI itself was crash-worthy. Get real.
In addition, the entire desktop will be hardware-accelerated, using a "photorealistic" desktop interface they have yet to reveal, code-named Aero.
I guess you missed the prologue, where Ian Holm himself appears as Bilbo and finds the ring in Gollum's cave.
But see, that's what would make it so great. I bet Peter Jackson would treat the ring whimsically, but have some sort of strange moment of hesitation on Bilbo's part at some point, some strange look, and a slight bit of the theme of the ring--you'd sit there thinking, oh, man, there it is, the cause of the whole huge story about to happen later on. And then the movie ignores it for the rest of the film. It would make Fellowship resonate all the more.
As an aside, think of how incredibly awesome the introduction of Gollum would be, him in his cave swimming up behind Bilbo's back. The audience will go nuts when Gollum appears again in theaters.
There's no way Holm can pass for that sort of age any more!
Uh, he did already, in Fellowship of the Ring. I'd be very surprised if they used a different actor for Bilbo. What's going to happen when you finish watching the Hobbit and then go into Fellowship and see that prologue? Ian Holm's gonna be the one stumbling across the ring in Gollum's cave. He's gonna be the one greeting Gandalf at Bag-End in the beginning. And he's the one Gandalf is going to say "hasn't aged a day."
Christopher Lee is like 82 freaking years old. If he can last three 3-hour movies playing an evil wizard, I think Ian Holm can stand to be a nervous little burglar running around invisibly.
Also each story gets more detailed as time progresses, very much like the Bible as well.
This was intentional. The history of Middle-Earth follows the same kind of mythological histories of our real world, in which the very early past is abstract and highly fantastical, and as time progresses elements become more historically grounded. Tolkien had studied the mythologies of real ancient civilizations and seemed to model the same sort of progression of tone in their histories.
Lord of the Rings symbolizes the passing of the Elves and the growing dominance of man, and therefore the passing of mythology and the growing dominance of literal history. In that way, it can very much be seen as like the Bible. The god of Middle-Earth was pretty active in the early days, and things were very mythological (the world was flat until it was violently curved), and by the time the Third Age rolls around, the god is non-existent in daily life, and magic is sort of a fading thing along with the Elves.
...allowing them to go back and redo the Gollum and other CG shots (Warg attack, anyone?) that weren't quite there yet but were damn close, and repackage them all in a super quadrilogy set.
Would I whore out and buy it? Hell yeah, I would.
Some people may wonder why SP2 will be so huge of a download when it comes out. The reason is that not only have they introduced the features outlined previously, but they have recompiled many of their core system files using the latest Visual Studio and its detection in order to further remove possible exploits and overflows.
I'm looking forward to SP2 more than I was looking forward to SP1.
Longhorn was never "postponed." They never gave a release date. Originally they were targetting late 2005, then said they would target early 2006, and haven't said a word since.
My favorite thing is when Slashdotters call it "vaporware."