Ah, jolly good. More drastic changes to the way the kernel works in the middle of a "stable" series. Either kernels should still be being released as 2.5.x or 2.7.0 should have been forked.
Your ethernet connection is reliable. While your wireless connection may claim to give 11Mbaud, it will never sustain that over any distance. Interference will cause all kinds of drop-outs, delays etc. Try putting the laptop right up against an access point and accessing the same stream.
"Mostly free software" is the enemy of "all free software". People like nVidia put out free (beer) software and get away with it, so there's no incentive for them to put out free (speech) software.
Yes, I know nVidia say they can't release the code for contract reasons - but if they really wanted to release the code they'd renegotiate the contracts with their suppliers. As a high-level producer they're in a position to seriously strong-arm their lower-level suppliers. If they say they aren't they're either lying or stupid.
Er, yes. If you read my post you would have spotted that I did pretty much say this. I'm sure it's fine for print-shop office types. All 50,000 of them. The point is, an application like this has the potential to be a major draw for ordinary, non-l33t printing people. It is possible to use Scribus to do the same kind of stuff that MS Publisher can do, just as it's possible to use it to do the job of QuarkXpress.
The point is, whereas MS Publisher makes it utterly trivial for a vicar to make a perfectly acceptable if somewhat generic events brochure for the church hall Scribus doesn't. The vicar may well only need to use the software 5 or 6 times a year - there is certainly no incentive for him to get to grips with the particular quirks of Scribus when it is much easier in Publisher. The same for family businesses making the odd promotional leaflet, the occasional flyer etc. They don't care about learning how it works, they by and large want something that gets an acceptable job done very easily.
And there are millions and millions of these people.
Now, you may not consider that Scribus ought to pander to their non-elite needs. But it could and, in my view, should.
Scribus looks like an okay program, and I'm sure that for printing office types who have the time to learn to use it properly it does a fine job. However there's an opportunity to make it a real "killer app" for far more people. Consider Microsoft Publisher. It's an okay sort of program - what makes it very useful for a lot of people is the vast template library which makes it very easy to get 90% of the way towards (say) a double-sided 3-panel sales brochure in about 5 minutes, requiring only that the default background is changed and perhaps some minor details altered. The templates are even themeable.
There seems to be nothing like this at all for scribus (in fact, by and large the range of templates available for OS office applications is pretty woeful). We really ought to get on top of this as a priority; otherwise MS Office will still have a massive lead in terms of useability to Joe Officeworker.
Get yourself a decent hosting service. Mine allows me to set up mail so that the default is for incoming to be 550ed except for specific mailboxes I set up. Now those still need spamcleaning but it's got to be better than trying to deal with spam sent to every possible mailbox that might exist for a domain.
It's a shame - the "OK" gesture the bird is making is not universal in its meaning. In Brazil, Germany and Russia it indicates a certain private orifice and is an insult. In France, it is also an insult. It denotes the number zero or the concept of something being worthless. I believe in Japan it means something like "I want my change in coins" which, although not particularly insulting, is pretty irrelevant.
Perhaps a "thumbs-up" gesture ought to be GIMPed over the top, at least as part of an i18n package for the countries affected.
If the company has a long record of being useless, of course, that would suggest that giving them time to fix the problem is wasted time, in which case full disclosure is probably the best option. That's probably also the case in the situation you describe, where you know for sure that a vulnerability is being exploited in a potentially serious or widespread way; in that case there isn't time for the niceties of advance warning and obviously admins need to be warned ASAP. But it's still good form to get word to the company first, or at least at the same time, so that they can try to fix the problem as soon as possible.
You could always release it to the company whose product is affected and give them $suitable_time to fix the vulnerability before you post on Bugtraq. That way it isn't just you that's working on a fix, and you look like you've tried to be a responsible netizen when, having failed to fix the problem in $reasonable_time, their shit gets cracked to pieces. That has always been the responsible way of announcing vulnerabilities; I don't see that this changes the situation.
Maybe. But given the two formats are for such completely different purposes I fail to see how this is relevant. PNG is much more obviously a competitor for GIF than for JPG.
Yes, but on the occasions when the minority fighting for change has improved the world (in terms of corporate affairs) they haven't done so by persuading a company to change its product. They've done so by launching something they consider better.
The ex-president of the LA LUG, having decided that his previous protest didn't go far enough, has given up breathing in protest at the US military's use of oxygen.
This guy seems to be going to an awful lot of trouble to find situations where linux' hardware support is incomplete. He could have made his point much better by pointing out the state of support for winmodems, wi-fi and modern video cards. By and large sound cards (especially the bog-standard on-board sound that Mom & Pop would likely have) do just work under linux - they aren't an issue.
Basically, although there are some genuine problems, they aren't the sort of things total newbies are likely to be faced with simply owing to the type of hardware total newbies are likely to buy.
Even the genuine "gaping holes" are not too bad. Video cards generally work okay under linux even if the accelerated functionality is missing, and that's fixable quite easily using binary drivers anyway. Wi-fi works fine so long as you check the hardware compatibility list first and buy something supported (almost any 802.11b and quite a few 802.11g cards now). Winmodems remain a problem, but even if yours isn't supported you can pick up a serial Olitec modem for 30 (or get a proper network connection:-)).
As you say, Garth Jennings is a new director. Give him a chance - would you have entrusted Lord of the Rings to Peter Jackson on the strength of Bad Taste?
I haven't read the article, but quoting numbers is a spectacularly pointless exercise. I don't care if only one FaultyOS server got cracked if there are only two deployed anywhere. Unless these numbers are related to the total number of deployed systems they are meaningless.
> And while the national crime rate rose 2 percent from 2000 to 2001, Chicago rates have dropped 16 percent in the last three years. So all this information can and does prevent crime and save lives
Ahem. A happened, and B happened, therefore A caused B? That's an awfully big jump to make without consideration of other factors at all.
> Thus far, the company has been hesitant to ship an open-source driver, based on its concerns that showing Centrino's underlying programming instructions might reveal previously unavailable information about the wireless networking technology.
Yeah. Because obviously no other companies have been able to produce wireless networking products. I can see the point of commercial secrecy when you have some l33t hardware that no-one else can make, but when you just have yet another implementation of something that's already widespread and implemented in lots of different ways it seems dumb to worry too much about protecting it through drivers. If the other companies cared enough about your particular methods they'd just get a team of coders to reverse engineer the closed-source drivers.
joins BSD, Firewire, Linux, SCSI, 32-bit computing, big mainframes, CDs, mp3s and film cameras in being proclaimed dead. In all these cases, rumours of their death have been greatly exaggerated..
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, jolly good. More drastic changes to the way the kernel works in the middle of a "stable" series. Either kernels should still be being released as 2.5.x or 2.7.0 should have been forked.
Bull. You're buying insurance from the wrong people.
Your ethernet connection is reliable. While your wireless connection may claim to give 11Mbaud, it will never sustain that over any distance. Interference will cause all kinds of drop-outs, delays etc. Try putting the laptop right up against an access point and accessing the same stream.
"Mostly free software" is the enemy of "all free software". People like nVidia put out free (beer) software and get away with it, so there's no incentive for them to put out free (speech) software.
Yes, I know nVidia say they can't release the code for contract reasons - but if they really wanted to release the code they'd renegotiate the contracts with their suppliers. As a high-level producer they're in a position to seriously strong-arm their lower-level suppliers. If they say they aren't they're either lying or stupid.
I suspect he means "support for pantone would require the Gimp/Scribus developers to license the library".
Er, yes. If you read my post you would have spotted that I did pretty much say this. I'm sure it's fine for print-shop office types. All 50,000 of them. The point is, an application like this has the potential to be a major draw for ordinary, non-l33t printing people. It is possible to use Scribus to do the same kind of stuff that MS Publisher can do, just as it's possible to use it to do the job of QuarkXpress.
The point is, whereas MS Publisher makes it utterly trivial for a vicar to make a perfectly acceptable if somewhat generic events brochure for the church hall Scribus doesn't. The vicar may well only need to use the software 5 or 6 times a year - there is certainly no incentive for him to get to grips with the particular quirks of Scribus when it is much easier in Publisher. The same for family businesses making the odd promotional leaflet, the occasional flyer etc. They don't care about learning how it works, they by and large want something that gets an acceptable job done very easily.
And there are millions and millions of these people.
Now, you may not consider that Scribus ought to pander to their non-elite needs. But it could and, in my view, should.
Scribus looks like an okay program, and I'm sure that for printing office types who have the time to learn to use it properly it does a fine job. However there's an opportunity to make it a real "killer app" for far more people. Consider Microsoft Publisher. It's an okay sort of program - what makes it very useful for a lot of people is the vast template library which makes it very easy to get 90% of the way towards (say) a double-sided 3-panel sales brochure in about 5 minutes, requiring only that the default background is changed and perhaps some minor details altered. The templates are even themeable.
There seems to be nothing like this at all for scribus (in fact, by and large the range of templates available for OS office applications is pretty woeful). We really ought to get on top of this as a priority; otherwise MS Office will still have a massive lead in terms of useability to Joe Officeworker.
Get yourself a decent hosting service. Mine allows me to set up mail so that the default is for incoming to be 550ed except for specific mailboxes I set up. Now those still need spamcleaning but it's got to be better than trying to deal with spam sent to every possible mailbox that might exist for a domain.
It's a shame - the "OK" gesture the bird is making is not universal in its meaning. In Brazil, Germany and Russia it indicates a certain private orifice and is an insult. In France, it is also an insult. It denotes the number zero or the concept of something being worthless.
I believe in Japan it means something like "I want my change in coins" which, although not particularly insulting, is pretty irrelevant.
Perhaps a "thumbs-up" gesture ought to be GIMPed over the top, at least as part of an i18n package for the countries affected.
If the company has a long record of being useless, of course, that would suggest that giving them time to fix the problem is wasted time, in which case full disclosure is probably the best option. That's probably also the case in the situation you describe, where you know for sure that a vulnerability is being exploited in a potentially serious or widespread way; in that case there isn't time for the niceties of advance warning and obviously admins need to be warned ASAP. But it's still good form to get word to the company first, or at least at the same time, so that they can try to fix the problem as soon as possible.
You could always release it to the company whose product is affected and give them $suitable_time to fix the vulnerability before you post on Bugtraq. That way it isn't just you that's working on a fix, and you look like you've tried to be a responsible netizen when, having failed to fix the problem in $reasonable_time, their shit gets cracked to pieces. That has always been the responsible way of announcing vulnerabilities; I don't see that this changes the situation.
Maybe. But given the two formats are for such completely different purposes I fail to see how this is relevant. PNG is much more obviously a competitor for GIF than for JPG.
Ah, but the DeLorean was made back in the good ol' days where vast amounts of heavy cumbersome safety equipment wasn't mandated by nannyish laws.
It's also still steel, and therefore heavy as shit. A modern non-rusting lightweight alloy is a much better bet for car design.
Yes, but on the occasions when the minority fighting for change has improved the world (in terms of corporate affairs) they haven't done so by persuading a company to change its product. They've done so by launching something they consider better.
The ex-president of the LA LUG, having decided that his previous protest didn't go far enough, has given up breathing in protest at the US military's use of oxygen.
What a wanker.
This guy seems to be going to an awful lot of trouble to find situations where linux' hardware support is incomplete. He could have made his point much better by pointing out the state of support for winmodems, wi-fi and modern video cards. By and large sound cards (especially the bog-standard on-board sound that Mom & Pop would likely have) do just work under linux - they aren't an issue.
:-)).
Basically, although there are some genuine problems, they aren't the sort of things total newbies are likely to be faced with simply owing to the type of hardware total newbies are likely to buy.
Even the genuine "gaping holes" are not too bad. Video cards generally work okay under linux even if the accelerated functionality is missing, and that's fixable quite easily using binary drivers anyway. Wi-fi works fine so long as you check the hardware compatibility list first and buy something supported (almost any 802.11b and quite a few 802.11g cards now). Winmodems remain a problem, but even if yours isn't supported you can pick up a serial Olitec modem for 30 (or get a proper network connection
We are altering the deal. Pray we do not alter it any further.
For some tasks distributed clusters are better, for others ultra-high-bandwidth Cray-type monsters are better. So what's new?
As you say, Garth Jennings is a new director. Give him a chance - would you have entrusted Lord of the Rings to Peter Jackson on the strength of Bad Taste?
I haven't read the article, but quoting numbers is a spectacularly pointless exercise. I don't care if only one FaultyOS server got cracked if there are only two deployed anywhere. Unless these numbers are related to the total number of deployed systems they are meaningless.
> And while the national crime rate rose 2 percent from 2000 to 2001, Chicago rates have dropped 16 percent in the last three years. So all this information can and does prevent crime and save lives
Ahem. A happened, and B happened, therefore A caused B? That's an awfully big jump to make without consideration of other factors at all.
That one is dead, isn't it? ;-)
> Thus far, the company has been hesitant to ship an open-source driver, based on its concerns that showing Centrino's underlying programming instructions might reveal previously unavailable information about the wireless networking technology.
Yeah. Because obviously no other companies have been able to produce wireless networking products. I can see the point of commercial secrecy when you have some l33t hardware that no-one else can make, but when you just have yet another implementation of something that's already widespread and implemented in lots of different ways it seems dumb to worry too much about protecting it through drivers. If the other companies cared enough about your particular methods they'd just get a team of coders to reverse engineer the closed-source drivers.
joins BSD, Firewire, Linux, SCSI, 32-bit computing, big mainframes, CDs, mp3s and film cameras in being proclaimed dead. In all these cases, rumours of their death have been greatly exaggerated..