We use OOo. It's better than MS Office in many ways. First, it is just the office suite; it doesn't do any network stuff so there I don't have any security concerns about it. Secondly, it doesn't come with Visual Basic. There is no reason why plain old word processing documents should have visual basic in them. It's just a monstrous security problem to have that. With OpenOffice, I don't need to virus-check files. If I want to, I can look at the XML directly and very easily confirm what the document is and is not doing.
My main hope right now is that all the office suites other than MS Office will standardize to the OOo XML format. That means OOo, KOffice, AbiWord, SoftMaker and WordPerfect should all adopt OOo XML as their default save format. Then we would have real choice and no format lock-in.
Finally, we have a way of having an encrypted FS in Linux that's not an ugly kludge like loopback. The modular system is great because we can add encryption, access control, all kinds of things without having to go through the trouble of writing an FS from scratch.
It's very disappointing that it took Linux all these years to get something as basic as a secure, encrypted way to store files. Even Windows has had FS encryption for a while.
The next release of Suse is going to be a doozy. KDE 3.3, Reiser 4.
Yes, we have. We have come up with the brilliant idea that you can stop creative, imaginative rule-breaking terrorists by coming up with a strict set of rules and following them like robots. For example, there was a case of a pilot being hassled by security over his nail clippers. The reality is that the only person on a plane who is tautologically incapable of hijacking a plane is the pilot! And nail clippers have never been a threat to airplanes. The real security flaw that the 9/11 hijackers exploited was our social condition to "comply and everything will be alright." That has never been true in history and it's not true now, but whatever. Americans will buy anything if it is sold the right way, so we've gone from a culture that says "I'm responsible and I will solve the problem" to a culture that says "I'm not responsible, I'll call 911 and hope that someone else will solve the problem in time." Many people have called 911 and then spent the rest of their lives waiting for help...
I'm sure other threads will bring this up, but Bruce Schneier has a great term for this: he calls it "security theater".
Fortunately terrorism isn't a threat in the US. The chances of dying of terrorism here are less than the chances of being killed by lightening or many other things. We shouldn't worry about it.
Ok, here's a link about responsibility and human rights.
Am I the only one who thinks these things are all boondogles? Let's see, bolting on the equipment for making a hybrid adds thousands of dollars to the price of the car. Let's say it adds on $5,000, and gas costs $3/gal (rough figures here). That means that the added cost of the hybrid is equal to 1666 gallons of gas. That's probably several years of driving a conventional car. It's a wash on economic savings, and it's not that much better in fossil fuel savings, and if you drive mostly highway miles, hybrid might not be any better at all.
Hydrogen is an even worse boondoggle. You have to have some enormous source of cheap energy to produce this hydrogen, and right now, that means you have to burn a huge amount of fossil fuels to get a little of that energy converted into hydrogen. You end up paying far more than you would pay for the equivalent energy in gasoline. Then you end up with a car that costs ten times what a regular car costs, has half the range and poor performance, and when you add everything up, it actually results in more carbon emissions.
There is an alternative to both hybrids and hydrogen: it's called electric vehicles. They are based on lithium batteries. They have a range that is almost as good as gasoline vehicles. They have no tailpipe emissions, and obviously they are powered by electricity, which can be generated from fossil fuels (obviously) but can also be generated by solar, nuclear (cf. France) and many other forms of energy. It seems like the big interest in boondoggles such as hybrids and hydrogen is because it preserves the huge barriers to entry that exist in creating a new car for sale. The barriers to entry for creating electric vehicles are much lower than for gas, and infinitely lower than for hydrogen cars.
If a company with a staff of less than 20 people, and no expenses beyond a bunch of server computers can make $100mil per year, they certainly don't need the capital raised by an IPO. They're doing it just because they can. That's exactly the same position that Google is in: they have plenty of revenue. They don't need to raise capital (which is the traditional purpose of an IPO). They are doing it just because they can.
This is a big contrast to the traditional purpose of an IPO: raise a lot of capital to finance some business need.
If someone goes out and buys an MS Windows machine and plugs it into DSL, it will be 0wnerd within minutes. The user needs to know how to install and configure a firewall, how to apply a regular stream of patches, how to read email safely, and many other things. All these are complicated issues, even for people with a good understanding of computers.
On a good Linux distro, none of these things are necessary. They usually come with firewalls pre-configured, the mail reader doesn't execute attachments, there are no real-world Linux viruses, and, while browsers do sometimes have security holes, they are rare and tend to be less severe than IE holes. Also, there is nothing like VB which infests every "productivity" application on Windows and also means that all these apps are vulnerable to VB viruses and malicious attachments.
So... it seems pretty clear that MS Windows is ready for a non-networked desktop. Buy the box, take it home, plug it into the power, turn it on and use it. But it's clearly not ready for networked desktop use, unless it's in a big corporation with professional network staff to keep the thing safe.
Linux is ready to turn on and plug in without any major worries.
It's great that this is out, and has Theora support. Now if only I could figure out how to get Mplayer to actually encode things into Theora I could use it.
This color scheme is also an annoyance we must deal with in a free society.
But seriously, it's quite amazing that they are admitting in court that their business model is a regretable annoyance. There are so many ways to make money which are a) legal and b) not annoying. I do agree with their lawyer that they should be allowed to continue; users should turn off functions which make their computers accessible to the net in general if they don't want to receive such things.
We are very very happy if carriers do things to block minors from accessing our content. Minors have no business being on our site and we don't want them on it.
However, we are not happy that carriers like Vodafone are blocking all porn, or carriers like Verizon are blocking all images from everyone. Those things are upsetting.
If Linux is going to do this, the best way would be in the form of an object persistence system like JDO. What is a file? A file is something that we can access sequentially, by reading and writing, or perhaps random access, by going to a specific location in a file and then reading sequentially from there.
That's great, but is that what we (application developers) want or need? No, it is not. In fact it is extremely different from what we want.
What we want is the ability to make objects (a word processor file, etc) persist. We also want to be able to search for these persistent objects in various ways, by saying "show me all the word processing files that have so-and-so as the author, and were created on this date and contain the word 'nigritude ultramarine'". That's what we want.
A file system that allows sequential access to bytes, and creates a hierarchy of names (/your/file/is/here.txt) is really very different from that. That's why we need to have persistence tools (like JDO, XML, etc) and also search tools (Unix locate, file browsers, etc). But these are just hacks because the real problem of object persistence and retrieval isn't solved in one place.
One problem with solving it is that Linux is all C and has C mentality all through it, even at the application layer. People still scoff at object oriented design. This gets in the way of implementing cool filesystems like this.
Reiser4 does not exactly have these object oriented features, but it's much closer than anything else, and the object persistence could easily be implemented using Reiser4. I'm glad to see that Suse is using it as the default FS. I hope it becomes part of the standard Linux kernel. I also like its plug-in architecture, so we may finally get some advanced FS-layer security features in Linux.
This is pointless. You don't need anything like gigabit for video phone. Gigabit lets you do full-motion uncompressed HDTV signals. Just guessing, 10gigabit would probably let you do digital cinema quality images very easily. 10gigabit has nothing at all to do with videophones. You can easily get a perfectly acceptable MPEG4 video stream into a DSL line. The hard part with videophones is having the right hardware and software to do that compression, plus having compatible software everywhere.
Clearly, this isn't something that you plug into your desktop computer so that Slashdot loads faster. But, if that's all you think of using the net for, here are some other ideas:
It allows distributed computing. 10gb/sec bandwidth is higher than the bandwidth between the CPU and memory in most PCs. With "Ethernet" like that, you could have a group of PCs all sharing a large chunk of memory, or extra CPUs, or other resources. Of course, the bandwidth is only one part of the infrastructure needed to make that happen, but it's part of it.
Continuing the topic above, it would be great for parallel/cluster computing. Some problems parallelize easily and don't require lots of interaction among nodes. Looking for hash collisions, for example, needs only low bandwidth among nodes. But other parallel tasks, like fluid modeling, do require high bandwidth. 10gbps "Ethernet" would make that easier, and if it's a commodity networking system, it will be the cheapest way to build super computers.
Of course, it's great for backbones. Why bother with Sonet when you can use "commodity" "Ethernet" instead?
Applications involving shared computing resources will definitely require plenty of other infrastructure, including (especially) software infrastructure. I'm using the word "Ethernet" in quotes above because this protocol doesn't really have much in common with Ethernet other than the name and the fact that it uses frames.
I know that I have bought quite a few PCs over the years, and they all have Windows pre-installed, and the first time I power them up, I put in a Linux CD/DVD and install. Windows never even gets a chance to say hello to me. There's no way to estimate how much of that is happening, other than to guess by looking at how much Suse is selling. Also, a lot of computers with Linux installed have both Linux and Windows and maybe even some others. The sum total of market share of installed OSes is MORE than 100%. Computers might have 95% Windows, 6% Linux, and 2% something else.
It seems like most printed materials we have these days are one-time-use. Newspapers, magazines, even most books, will only be read once, and then recycled. Some kind of reusable book display mechanism (yes, an e-book) seems like a much cheaper and more environmentally-friendly way to do this. I would happily pay more to have less waste. An on-demand book printer just makes this problem worse because we'll print more and more stuff, when we should be looking for ways to print less stuff.
Slashdot switching from mod_perl to a JSP/Servlet backend is going to be a very interesting change. It will finally put an end to all this "Java is not scalable enough" and "Java is slow" type of talk we see here.
If it doesn't work, then I'm guessing that Slashdot will move to the ultimate in stable, secure and scalable web architectures: ASP.net.
It's le nouveau overlord. Lord is masculine. But what am I complaining about, this is Slashdot, stories often have grammar, spelling and content mistakes even when they are in English.
One out of two planets relies on solar electric power for 100% of its transportation needs. The other is pumping out so much CO2 that its temperature is rising. It seems like they need more CO2 on Mars and we need more solar electricity here. Ah, humans, doing things backwards.
Using this method you can store surprisingly large amounts of data very cheaply. It's also protected from MS Windows viruses, but perhaps not all viruses.
I have used TextMaker on Linux and it's great. It's fast and is all around an excellent word processor. It's affordable and I don't mind paying for it. However, I won't use it, because it still uses MS.doc file formats, and that's the thing that I'm trying to get away from. As long as my data are locked up in someone else's proprietary files, I'm in a bad situation.
Fortunately it seems like everyone is moving towards OpenOffice files. Future versions of TextMaker and PlanMaker are supposed to be using OpenOffice files, as are Koffice and perhaps others. In an ideal world, on Linux we would be able to choose among OpenOffice/StarOffice, SoftMaker (TextMaker etc), WordPerfect (yes, it runs on Linux), and Koffice, and all use one file format. That world is coming soon I think.
The Tzero does not have a 100 mile range. It's closer to 300 miles. They have switched to lithium batteries. It is predicted that mass-produced automotive lithium-sulfur batteries could have ranges of well over 400 miles. That's more than any dino-juice burners get, and the performance is better.
SpeakFreely used to be a fairly good option. I tried it several years ago, and it did work ok so long as everyone was on broadband. The project has been abandoned, though, and no future releases are planned.
At this point, all the tools needed to create an Open Source cross-platform VoIP system are easily available. The Speex codec is specifically designed for low-bit-rate voice, is BSD licensed, and is implemented in both C and Java. It would not be hard to take this codec, throw in some good sound libraries and some crypto libraries (OpenSSL perhaps) and roll up a VoIP client. In fact there is a Speex implementation for Java, so you could write one in Java, and yes, Java really is "write once run anywhere" these days. Someday when I have more time I might do this. As a Java applet it would be great because there would be nothing to install.
When you go with a closed-source OS such as MS Windows, you are giving up control of your computer to someone else. Someone whose interests are not necessarily the same as your interests. In fact it's not really possible to know what those interests are even. And this is what happens. You end up with computers which execute code without the user's consent or even knowledge, whether that code comes in on an email, through an auto-update feature, or as a hidden code on a CD.
With an Open Source based system, hidden features are almost impossible. This results in a mentality among the developers of leaving the user in control. That's why Mozilla had pop-up blocking before IE. That's why, in its default configuration, Konqueror asks if you want to accept cookies from every website, whereas IE happily accepts them all unless you configure it not to. That's why by default Evolution does not execute attachments or load images (with potential web bugs) into an email when it views it. These factors together are why there aren't Linux viruses: executing code is under the user's control because nothing is hidden at any level.
And I think that this is the underlying reason why countries such as Germany are adopting Linux as a desktop system. They can't really know whose interests Microsoft is aligned with, but they can take a good guess that MS' interests aren't solidly aligned with theirs, and they don't want to give up control in such a situation. Hence Linux. This is the biggest problem that closed source OS vendors must face, and there's no real answer to it other than to open the OS and application software.
This post submitted from Konqueror, running on my Suse desktop system.
Slashdot Mirror
My main hope right now is that all the office suites other than MS Office will standardize to the OOo XML format. That means OOo, KOffice, AbiWord, SoftMaker and WordPerfect should all adopt OOo XML as their default save format. Then we would have real choice and no format lock-in.
It's very disappointing that it took Linux all these years to get something as basic as a secure, encrypted way to store files. Even Windows has had FS encryption for a while.
The next release of Suse is going to be a doozy. KDE 3.3, Reiser 4.
I'm sure other threads will bring this up, but Bruce Schneier has a great term for this: he calls it "security theater".
Fortunately terrorism isn't a threat in the US. The chances of dying of terrorism here are less than the chances of being killed by lightening or many other things. We shouldn't worry about it.
Ok, here's a link about responsibility and human rights.
If they find pyramids under there, stay away from them.
WAP is alive and well, and is used for mobile porn.
Hydrogen is an even worse boondoggle. You have to have some enormous source of cheap energy to produce this hydrogen, and right now, that means you have to burn a huge amount of fossil fuels to get a little of that energy converted into hydrogen. You end up paying far more than you would pay for the equivalent energy in gasoline. Then you end up with a car that costs ten times what a regular car costs, has half the range and poor performance, and when you add everything up, it actually results in more carbon emissions.
There is an alternative to both hybrids and hydrogen: it's called electric vehicles. They are based on lithium batteries. They have a range that is almost as good as gasoline vehicles. They have no tailpipe emissions, and obviously they are powered by electricity, which can be generated from fossil fuels (obviously) but can also be generated by solar, nuclear (cf. France) and many other forms of energy. It seems like the big interest in boondoggles such as hybrids and hydrogen is because it preserves the huge barriers to entry that exist in creating a new car for sale. The barriers to entry for creating electric vehicles are much lower than for gas, and infinitely lower than for hydrogen cars.
This is a big contrast to the traditional purpose of an IPO: raise a lot of capital to finance some business need.
This seems like an interesting new approach.
On a good Linux distro, none of these things are necessary. They usually come with firewalls pre-configured, the mail reader doesn't execute attachments, there are no real-world Linux viruses, and, while browsers do sometimes have security holes, they are rare and tend to be less severe than IE holes. Also, there is nothing like VB which infests every "productivity" application on Windows and also means that all these apps are vulnerable to VB viruses and malicious attachments.
So... it seems pretty clear that MS Windows is ready for a non-networked desktop. Buy the box, take it home, plug it into the power, turn it on and use it. But it's clearly not ready for networked desktop use, unless it's in a big corporation with professional network staff to keep the thing safe.
Linux is ready to turn on and plug in without any major worries.
It's great that this is out, and has Theora support. Now if only I could figure out how to get Mplayer to actually encode things into Theora I could use it.
But seriously, it's quite amazing that they are admitting in court that their business model is a regretable annoyance. There are so many ways to make money which are a) legal and b) not annoying. I do agree with their lawyer that they should be allowed to continue; users should turn off functions which make their computers accessible to the net in general if they don't want to receive such things.
However, we are not happy that carriers like Vodafone are blocking all porn, or carriers like Verizon are blocking all images from everyone. Those things are upsetting.
That's great, but is that what we (application developers) want or need? No, it is not. In fact it is extremely different from what we want.
What we want is the ability to make objects (a word processor file, etc) persist. We also want to be able to search for these persistent objects in various ways, by saying "show me all the word processing files that have so-and-so as the author, and were created on this date and contain the word 'nigritude ultramarine'". That's what we want.
A file system that allows sequential access to bytes, and creates a hierarchy of names (/your/file/is/here.txt) is really very different from that. That's why we need to have persistence tools (like JDO, XML, etc) and also search tools (Unix locate, file browsers, etc). But these are just hacks because the real problem of object persistence and retrieval isn't solved in one place.
One problem with solving it is that Linux is all C and has C mentality all through it, even at the application layer. People still scoff at object oriented design. This gets in the way of implementing cool filesystems like this.
Reiser4 does not exactly have these object oriented features, but it's much closer than anything else, and the object persistence could easily be implemented using Reiser4. I'm glad to see that Suse is using it as the default FS. I hope it becomes part of the standard Linux kernel. I also like its plug-in architecture, so we may finally get some advanced FS-layer security features in Linux.
MindGuard provides pyschotronic mind-control protection and runs on Linux. Try it, you'll see how well it works.
This is pointless. You don't need anything like gigabit for video phone. Gigabit lets you do full-motion uncompressed HDTV signals. Just guessing, 10gigabit would probably let you do digital cinema quality images very easily. 10gigabit has nothing at all to do with videophones. You can easily get a perfectly acceptable MPEG4 video stream into a DSL line. The hard part with videophones is having the right hardware and software to do that compression, plus having compatible software everywhere.
- It allows distributed computing. 10gb/sec bandwidth is higher than the bandwidth between the CPU and memory in most PCs. With "Ethernet" like that, you could have a group of PCs all sharing a large chunk of memory, or extra CPUs, or other resources. Of course, the bandwidth is only one part of the infrastructure needed to make that happen, but it's part of it.
- Continuing the topic above, it would be great for parallel/cluster computing. Some problems parallelize easily and don't require lots of interaction among nodes. Looking for hash collisions, for example, needs only low bandwidth among nodes. But other parallel tasks, like fluid modeling, do require high bandwidth. 10gbps "Ethernet" would make that easier, and if it's a commodity networking system, it will be the cheapest way to build super computers.
- Of course, it's great for backbones. Why bother with Sonet when you can use "commodity" "Ethernet" instead?
Applications involving shared computing resources will definitely require plenty of other infrastructure, including (especially) software infrastructure. I'm using the word "Ethernet" in quotes above because this protocol doesn't really have much in common with Ethernet other than the name and the fact that it uses frames.I know that I have bought quite a few PCs over the years, and they all have Windows pre-installed, and the first time I power them up, I put in a Linux CD/DVD and install. Windows never even gets a chance to say hello to me. There's no way to estimate how much of that is happening, other than to guess by looking at how much Suse is selling. Also, a lot of computers with Linux installed have both Linux and Windows and maybe even some others. The sum total of market share of installed OSes is MORE than 100%. Computers might have 95% Windows, 6% Linux, and 2% something else.
It seems like most printed materials we have these days are one-time-use. Newspapers, magazines, even most books, will only be read once, and then recycled. Some kind of reusable book display mechanism (yes, an e-book) seems like a much cheaper and more environmentally-friendly way to do this. I would happily pay more to have less waste. An on-demand book printer just makes this problem worse because we'll print more and more stuff, when we should be looking for ways to print less stuff.
If it doesn't work, then I'm guessing that Slashdot will move to the ultimate in stable, secure and scalable web architectures: ASP.net.
It's le nouveau overlord. Lord is masculine. But what am I complaining about, this is Slashdot, stories often have grammar, spelling and content mistakes even when they are in English.
One out of two planets relies on solar electric power for 100% of its transportation needs. The other is pumping out so much CO2 that its temperature is rising. It seems like they need more CO2 on Mars and we need more solar electricity here. Ah, humans, doing things backwards.
Using this method you can store surprisingly large amounts of data very cheaply. It's also protected from MS Windows viruses, but perhaps not all viruses.
Fortunately it seems like everyone is moving towards OpenOffice files. Future versions of TextMaker and PlanMaker are supposed to be using OpenOffice files, as are Koffice and perhaps others. In an ideal world, on Linux we would be able to choose among OpenOffice/StarOffice, SoftMaker (TextMaker etc), WordPerfect (yes, it runs on Linux), and Koffice, and all use one file format. That world is coming soon I think.
The Tzero does not have a 100 mile range. It's closer to 300 miles. They have switched to lithium batteries. It is predicted that mass-produced automotive lithium-sulfur batteries could have ranges of well over 400 miles. That's more than any dino-juice burners get, and the performance is better.
At this point, all the tools needed to create an Open Source cross-platform VoIP system are easily available. The Speex codec is specifically designed for low-bit-rate voice, is BSD licensed, and is implemented in both C and Java. It would not be hard to take this codec, throw in some good sound libraries and some crypto libraries (OpenSSL perhaps) and roll up a VoIP client. In fact there is a Speex implementation for Java, so you could write one in Java, and yes, Java really is "write once run anywhere" these days. Someday when I have more time I might do this. As a Java applet it would be great because there would be nothing to install.
With an Open Source based system, hidden features are almost impossible. This results in a mentality among the developers of leaving the user in control. That's why Mozilla had pop-up blocking before IE. That's why, in its default configuration, Konqueror asks if you want to accept cookies from every website, whereas IE happily accepts them all unless you configure it not to. That's why by default Evolution does not execute attachments or load images (with potential web bugs) into an email when it views it. These factors together are why there aren't Linux viruses: executing code is under the user's control because nothing is hidden at any level.
And I think that this is the underlying reason why countries such as Germany are adopting Linux as a desktop system. They can't really know whose interests Microsoft is aligned with, but they can take a good guess that MS' interests aren't solidly aligned with theirs, and they don't want to give up control in such a situation. Hence Linux. This is the biggest problem that closed source OS vendors must face, and there's no real answer to it other than to open the OS and application software.
This post submitted from Konqueror, running on my Suse desktop system.