If it's "close enough", surely big business are going to do more research than just look at whether it's been certified by The Open Group just so the Linux community can use its trademark?
The problem, as well, is what to certify. There are so many combinations of kernel, drivers, libc, userspace utilities and windowing systems that any certificate could well be rendered useless.
For example, if IBM paid for SuSE to get certified, would that apply to RHEL or Debian, if they were using slightly different kernel versions or different kernel patches as is often the case?
To be honest, it sounds like the testers were just getting desperate with the whole nail-to-a-tree thing. They weren't expecting all the cards to survive all the tests, and it would make for a pretty dull magazine article if they just wrote "all the cards are indistructable".
Being designed for laptops, arent Pentium M chips much more expensive than P4s?
I can't speak for American prices, but over here we can get a 1.7GHz Pentium M for about 190GBP, the same price as a Prescott 3.2GHz. So yes, there is a definite price premium, but no, the difference is not huge, especially since the Pentium M's are very overclockable, or so I've heard.
Opening the glossary information in a new window (one without toolbars, etc), allows you to provide that information to the user without interrupting their workflow. Toolbars are extraneous to the window, since it never shows anything but the glossary page. Showing them would be pointless, and would detract from the look-and-feel of the application.
Agreed there are some circumstances that it's useful, but I think the problems outweigh the benefits, ultimately. In your examples, why not use CSS positioning with some Javascript to make a popup definitions and windows for subtasks?
May sound stupid, but it somehow wouldn't surprise me if the RIAA/MPAA were stupid enough to subpoena that site to get a list of IPs for each submission. Of course, if INDUCE goes through, the site could be prosecuted directly for promoting/enabling copyright infringement...
Why is this story in the Apple category? Sure, the iPod may be considered to be the "gold standard" for music players by many people, but Apple certainly weren't first, and although they have a sexy design and a great UI, there are plenty of competitors who are shipping thousands of units who do everything nearly as well, and some things better, often for a significantly lower price.
I'm not trying to bash Apple, I like their products (although my pockets aren't normally deep enough to afford their latest kit, I have a G4 cube next to my PC), but putting this into the Apple category just seems a bit odd.
The real problem here is not so much XUL, but Javascript!
Why does the browser even allow Javascript to create popup windows without toolbars, menu bars and status bars? This has to be one of the most annoying features of any web browser, I can't for the life of me understand why anyone would think up or need such a feature.
Without this Javascript, you couldn't turn the real menubars and toolbars off, and the problem would be much less severe since although you'd have a second set of interface controls within the browser window, the real status bar would be at the bottom, and the real menubar would be at the top.
Firefox already has a way to block JS from doing this and using several other of its most annoying features, and indeed I personally have these limits switched on already. Put about:config in the address bar, and change these entires to the following values (or look up how to make a user.js file on Google):
Why is it that developers feel the need to periodically scrap everything they've been working on, then reimplement it, usually in a more half-assed way than the original? (I'm talking to you, Apache programmers!;)
But seriously, where's the need to dump HTTP? It's not exactly a complicated protocol, and can be adapted to do many different things. Pretty much any protocol can be tunneled over HTTP, even those you'd normally consider to be connection-orientated socket protocols.
As for HTML, again - why the need? By using object tags and plug-ins, the browser is almost infinitely extensible. Flash and Java bring more interactive content, streaming brings sound and video, PDF brings exact display of a document to any platform, and people are using all sorts of different XML-type markups every day now, such as RSS, XML-RPC, SOAP, and so on to do all kinds of interesting things like Web Services and RPC.
Microsoft and the open source community are both working on markup-like things that will enable applications to operate over the web (all via HTTP). XAML and XUL's descendents might well have a big future, especially if the way documents should be displayed is more rigourously specified than HTML.
Well, with 128-bit addressing you could address something like 2 billion cubic metres of carbon atoms individually. I guess we won't reach this any time soon, probably not for at least a few hundred years;)
Is the summary serious in the suggestion that these creatures are separately evolved from all the other species on Earth? A totally separate ecosystem with its own spontaneous life-forming process which created original strands of basic RNA/DNA/amino acids as occured for our ancestors in the primeval rock pools of Earth?
I somehow doubt it, for this would be a fairly phenominal discovery. In fact, if you RTFA, this isn't what's being suggested at all.
Until we find such an ecosystem, on Earth or elsewhere in the solar system, the probability of life begining on a world with suitable conditions is the most uncertain variable in the Drake equation. This discovery shows that life can survive in such an environment, but it does not show that it can arise.
So, we have Microsoft in the distinctly red corner with their proprietary standard.
Let's face it, as vocal as the OSS community is these days, there's not a lot that can be done to stop Microsoft from doing whatever the hell they like, so long as it's legal(!). Sure, sendmail is OSS software, but I got the impression that SPF is pretty much independent of the MTA software anyway.
But, in the blue corner, we have plenty of heavyweight companies who are big on Linux and big on e-mail who have teams of lawyers that have undoutedbly been over this license already, and found the problems.
We have IBM, the people who make Lotus Notes, which is still pretty widely used, IIRC. We have Novell, who now own SuSE/Ximian and are betting the shop on Linux, who produce NetWare. We also have Sun, who are getting vocal on OSS, which produces Solaris, which seems to power a large proportion of MTAs around the globe.
The best defense, surely, is to make sure these companies understand the issues with SPF, and don't implement it in their own products. After all, Microsoft won't get that far without support from other companies, since much as they'd like to, they don't currently control the world's Internet server market....
Even if humankind puts 5 billion people on a planet around every star in the galaxy, that's still 680564733841876925 IP addresses per person.
Re:v6 could help solve some net problems
on
IPv6 is Here
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Or, you could just type "ssh pc1.id.isp.com". If IPv6 brings a demand for memorable DNS addresses for everyone, I'm sure the ISPs will provide. Considering you'll most likely be able to put each machine on a static IP within your subsubnet within your ISP's subnet, services like DynDNS will no longer be needed, so you can just register a domain and run your own nameserver.
IIRC, Apple's X implementation is a fork of XFree with some custom enhancements to run in rootless mode under Aqua and integrate with the native window manager and hardware drawing acceleration. So it's really "neither". If you were so inclined, presumably you could load up Darwin/XNU in console mode and compile and run either XFree or X.org fullscreen, since the code bases are almost identical at this point.
I haven't seen the BBC use any animated GIFs (at least on BBC News which is the site I visit most frequently). Most of the time they seem to use a combination of Javascript (to step through a series of images) or Flash (for interactive presentations).
Re:Why it wasn't put in already
on
Hacking Quartz
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Perhaps Apple's HCI team didn't consider it to be "intuitive" or comprehensible/necessary for the average user. After all, the majority of Macs are shipped with high(ish) resolution screens these days, and the Dock and Exposé take care of managing your screen real estate fairly well.
The counter on the front page of Apple.com seems stuck at 94,767,325 no matter how much I'm refreshing. A live updater would be more handy;)
But seriously, much as I dislike the RIAA, its tactics and current copyright arrangements for music and films in general, it's nice to see a company other than Microsoft having some success for a change.
... and it's no fun for the network administrator. A big problem we (and by 'we' I mean a school where I used to do volunteer work) had with NT4 years ago was network messaging using 'net send' from the command line. No matter what we tried, locking down local hard disks, removing applications, whatever, the little fsckers still found ways to access it. The most innovative was using the File -> Open dialog of an MS Office dialog to get to c:\winnt\system32 (since thanks to Microsoft's code re-use, these dialogs are custom, not the system-wide standard ones), using the dialog to add cmd32 as an IE Favorite, launching IE and clicking on Favorites -> cmd32. Voila, the command line.
I hear Win2K and WinXP are improved, but to be honest I think trying to completely lock down a system that clearly isn't designed to be locked down is a lost cause.
Think about exactly what you're doing, and try not to catch Diebold syndrome*. If you want to provide a terminal for web browsing and e-mail, is a full Windows install necessary? Why not go for Mozilla on Linux, which will connect to your Windows-based TCP/IP network and provide the functions you want. Of course, your requirements might be a lot more complex, so this might not be an option.
If so, why not consider enforcement rather than prevention? Tell the users they can't do this, can't do that, and track them if necessary. If they break the rules, suspend them from the network. Placing software restrictions on people will often upset them, especially if they have a legitimate use for doing odd things (like installing a new media codec to watch a video they need for their work).
* Diebold syndrome: believing that a full multi-tasking memory-protected graphical operating system that consumes 300MHz of processor power and 500MB of disk space is the best basis for a dumb embedded system such as eVoting or an ATM
Slashdot Mirror
If it's "close enough", surely big business are going to do more research than just look at whether it's been certified by The Open Group just so the Linux community can use its trademark?
The problem, as well, is what to certify. There are so many combinations of kernel, drivers, libc, userspace utilities and windowing systems that any certificate could well be rendered useless.
For example, if IBM paid for SuSE to get certified, would that apply to RHEL or Debian, if they were using slightly different kernel versions or different kernel patches as is often the case?
To be honest, it sounds like the testers were just getting desperate with the whole nail-to-a-tree thing. They weren't expecting all the cards to survive all the tests, and it would make for a pretty dull magazine article if they just wrote "all the cards are indistructable".
May sound stupid, but it somehow wouldn't surprise me if the RIAA/MPAA were stupid enough to subpoena that site to get a list of IPs for each submission. Of course, if INDUCE goes through, the site could be prosecuted directly for promoting/enabling copyright infringement...
Why is this story in the Apple category? Sure, the iPod may be considered to be the "gold standard" for music players by many people, but Apple certainly weren't first, and although they have a sexy design and a great UI, there are plenty of competitors who are shipping thousands of units who do everything nearly as well, and some things better, often for a significantly lower price.
I'm not trying to bash Apple, I like their products (although my pockets aren't normally deep enough to afford their latest kit, I have a G4 cube next to my PC), but putting this into the Apple category just seems a bit odd.
Well, how about a popup dialog box, for example telling the user that "the page you are viewing is trying to use XUL..." or something more friendly?
The real problem here is not so much XUL, but Javascript!
Why does the browser even allow Javascript to create popup windows without toolbars, menu bars and status bars? This has to be one of the most annoying features of any web browser, I can't for the life of me understand why anyone would think up or need such a feature.
Without this Javascript, you couldn't turn the real menubars and toolbars off, and the problem would be much less severe since although you'd have a second set of interface controls within the browser window, the real status bar would be at the bottom, and the real menubar would be at the top.
Firefox already has a way to block JS from doing this and using several other of its most annoying features, and indeed I personally have these limits switched on already. Put about:config in the address bar, and change these entires to the following values (or look up how to make a user.js file on Google):
dom.disable_window_move_resize = true
dom.disable_window_open_feature.close = true
dom.disable_window_open_feature.directories = true
dom.disable_window_open_feature.location = true
dom.disable_window_open_feature.menubar = true
dom.disable_window_open_feature.minimizable = true
dom.disable_window_open_feature.personalbar = true
dom.disable_window_open_feature.resizable = true
dom.disable_window_open_feature.scrollbars = true
dom.disable_window_open_feature.status = true
dom.disable_window_open_feature.titlebar = true
dom.disable_window_open_feature.toolbar = true
dom.disable_window_status_change = true
Now try the example given in the summary again.
Why is it that developers feel the need to periodically scrap everything they've been working on, then reimplement it, usually in a more half-assed way than the original? (I'm talking to you, Apache programmers! ;)
But seriously, where's the need to dump HTTP? It's not exactly a complicated protocol, and can be adapted to do many different things. Pretty much any protocol can be tunneled over HTTP, even those you'd normally consider to be connection-orientated socket protocols.
As for HTML, again - why the need? By using object tags and plug-ins, the browser is almost infinitely extensible. Flash and Java bring more interactive content, streaming brings sound and video, PDF brings exact display of a document to any platform, and people are using all sorts of different XML-type markups every day now, such as RSS, XML-RPC, SOAP, and so on to do all kinds of interesting things like Web Services and RPC.
Microsoft and the open source community are both working on markup-like things that will enable applications to operate over the web (all via HTTP). XAML and XUL's descendents might well have a big future, especially if the way documents should be displayed is more rigourously specified than HTML.
Well, with 128-bit addressing you could address something like 2 billion cubic metres of carbon atoms individually. I guess we won't reach this any time soon, probably not for at least a few hundred years ;)
Is the summary serious in the suggestion that these creatures are separately evolved from all the other species on Earth? A totally separate ecosystem with its own spontaneous life-forming process which created original strands of basic RNA/DNA/amino acids as occured for our ancestors in the primeval rock pools of Earth?
I somehow doubt it, for this would be a fairly phenominal discovery. In fact, if you RTFA, this isn't what's being suggested at all.
Until we find such an ecosystem, on Earth or elsewhere in the solar system, the probability of life begining on a world with suitable conditions is the most uncertain variable in the Drake equation. This discovery shows that life can survive in such an environment, but it does not show that it can arise.
So, we have Microsoft in the distinctly red corner with their proprietary standard.
Let's face it, as vocal as the OSS community is these days, there's not a lot that can be done to stop Microsoft from doing whatever the hell they like, so long as it's legal(!). Sure, sendmail is OSS software, but I got the impression that SPF is pretty much independent of the MTA software anyway.
But, in the blue corner, we have plenty of heavyweight companies who are big on Linux and big on e-mail who have teams of lawyers that have undoutedbly been over this license already, and found the problems.
We have IBM, the people who make Lotus Notes, which is still pretty widely used, IIRC. We have Novell, who now own SuSE/Ximian and are betting the shop on Linux, who produce NetWare. We also have Sun, who are getting vocal on OSS, which produces Solaris, which seems to power a large proportion of MTAs around the globe.
The best defense, surely, is to make sure these companies understand the issues with SPF, and don't implement it in their own products. After all, Microsoft won't get that far without support from other companies, since much as they'd like to, they don't currently control the world's Internet server market....
There we go, you're catching on to Microsoft's strategy!
If anyone hasn't heard what the parent is refering to, then see the announcement here. RIP to him and my thoughts to his family.
Even if humankind puts 5 billion people on a planet around every star in the galaxy, that's still 680564733841876925 IP addresses per person.
Or, you could just type "ssh pc1.id.isp.com". If IPv6 brings a demand for memorable DNS addresses for everyone, I'm sure the ISPs will provide. Considering you'll most likely be able to put each machine on a static IP within your subsubnet within your ISP's subnet, services like DynDNS will no longer be needed, so you can just register a domain and run your own nameserver.
IIRC, Apple's X implementation is a fork of XFree with some custom enhancements to run in rootless mode under Aqua and integrate with the native window manager and hardware drawing acceleration. So it's really "neither". If you were so inclined, presumably you could load up Darwin/XNU in console mode and compile and run either XFree or X.org fullscreen, since the code bases are almost identical at this point.
Trillian Pro, it also handles Instant Messaging.
I haven't seen the BBC use any animated GIFs (at least on BBC News which is the site I visit most frequently). Most of the time they seem to use a combination of Javascript (to step through a series of images) or Flash (for interactive presentations).
Perhaps Apple's HCI team didn't consider it to be "intuitive" or comprehensible/necessary for the average user. After all, the majority of Macs are shipped with high(ish) resolution screens these days, and the Dock and Exposé take care of managing your screen real estate fairly well.
The problem is that the SDK 1.3 and 1.4 are still referred to as Java2.
The counter on the front page of Apple.com seems stuck at 94,767,325 no matter how much I'm refreshing. A live updater would be more handy ;)
But seriously, much as I dislike the RIAA, its tactics and current copyright arrangements for music and films in general, it's nice to see a company other than Microsoft having some success for a change.
Not sure whether it's the Slashdot effect or something genuine in FireFox 0.9, but the demo doesn't work for me.
... and it's no fun for the network administrator. A big problem we (and by 'we' I mean a school where I used to do volunteer work) had with NT4 years ago was network messaging using 'net send' from the command line. No matter what we tried, locking down local hard disks, removing applications, whatever, the little fsckers still found ways to access it. The most innovative was using the File -> Open dialog of an MS Office dialog to get to c:\winnt\system32 (since thanks to Microsoft's code re-use, these dialogs are custom, not the system-wide standard ones), using the dialog to add cmd32 as an IE Favorite, launching IE and clicking on Favorites -> cmd32. Voila, the command line.
I hear Win2K and WinXP are improved, but to be honest I think trying to completely lock down a system that clearly isn't designed to be locked down is a lost cause.
Think about exactly what you're doing, and try not to catch Diebold syndrome*. If you want to provide a terminal for web browsing and e-mail, is a full Windows install necessary? Why not go for Mozilla on Linux, which will connect to your Windows-based TCP/IP network and provide the functions you want. Of course, your requirements might be a lot more complex, so this might not be an option.
If so, why not consider enforcement rather than prevention? Tell the users they can't do this, can't do that, and track them if necessary. If they break the rules, suspend them from the network. Placing software restrictions on people will often upset them, especially if they have a legitimate use for doing odd things (like installing a new media codec to watch a video they need for their work).
* Diebold syndrome: believing that a full multi-tasking memory-protected graphical operating system that consumes 300MHz of processor power and 500MB of disk space is the best basis for a dumb embedded system such as eVoting or an ATM