It gives the user the tools necessary to make an educated decision instead of rolling the dice.
Most real-world users are incapable of making educated decisions; therefore, code signing is a useless security measure for most users. (And the ones that could make educated decisions would prefer not to be bothered by this sort of noise.)
Care to elaborate on that point?
Given the number of unsigned components people have to install on their Windows machines in order to get them to run, Microsoft is clearly unable to enforce that all software is consistently signed. As a result, Windows users are constantly bothered by pointless warnings about unsigned code, and important warnings are drowned out by all that noise.
So, which is better? One point which has to be monitored, or every point between the build machine and the location stamping the cds
What is better is to use a sensible and effective way of preventing infections and security problems. Linux manages to do that, Microsoft doesn't.
As opposed to your statements, which I think are based in some sort of fantasy land where the bad guys only try to exploit problems after they've been fixed...
Microsoft should fix the pervasive actual security problems with their software first and then worry about the hypothetical ones.
As I was saying, the proof is in the pudding. In the end, signed or not, using Firefox on Windows is more secure than using IE on Windows, to the limited degree that using anything on Windows can ever be secure. The most secure choice, however, is to run Firefox on Linux.
So all of those email worms don't entice users to open the attachment by naming their payload as awesomescreensaver.exe huh?
Well, since Microsoft now uses code signing, it is obvious that code signing is neither necessary nor sufficient for preventing that sort of thing. In fact, Microsoft's inept use of code signing actually aggravates the problem.
I suppose you don't recall an incident years ago where some virus managed to make its way onto a cd and onto store shelves.
Yes, and with code signing in place, the developer would have signed the virus-infested application and still shipped it.
A hole is a hole. Saying "well, it isn't a problem yet" doesn't change that.
Thanks for stating again so clearly your fundamental lack of understanding of security.
Apache2's Windows [...] uses a standard MSI package and is very polished.
Well, and Linux packages are even more polished than MSI; that's not what I was referring to.
you have to edit the.conf file but it's full of documentation and I was able to teach myself quite a bit just by reading the comments in that file and Googling where necessary.
The problem isn't knowing what to put in the.conf files (I know that perfectly well), it's that even if you know what to put there, you still have to deal with hundreds of options, dozens of modules, and lots of weird interactions between them all. Apache configuration is far more complex than it ought to be because it provides flexibility in areas where even fairly complex sites just don't need flexibility.
PHP prides itself on being an easy-to-use language for web applications, and it succeeds. Unfortunately, Apache hasn't become any easier to install and configure between 1.x and 2.x; in fact, if anything, I think it has gotten overall worse. That's why Apache 1.x is a better match to PHP than Apache 2.x. If Apache wants 2.x to be a better match with PHP, then Apache needs to address the problems the PHP community sees with 2.x.
Personally, I'd like to see more server alternatives to Apache anyway. I think there should be a handful of FOSS web servers capable of hosting PHP, web servers that make different kinds of tradeoffs between performance, security, and ease-of-use. The huge market share that Apache has, from my point of view, is a problem, just like the huge market share that Microsoft has in other areas.
That would be a limitation imposed by "limiations"/lack of functionality on the unix side. [...] The only comprehensive solution I can think of would involve placing all of the information required to verify the authenticity of a binary in the file itself in a manner which cannot be modified once it gets "signed." Which is pretty much what binary signing does in the Windows world.
Linux packages contain complete version information, documentation, and dependencies. When you sign a package, you sign all of that. Furthermore, the installer will make sure that you are, in fact, installing the latest version, unless you explicitly tell it not to. Microsoft's packaging system is inferior to the Linux packaging systems in pretty much every respect, including security. Sorry, try again.
In the Windows world, you'd be easily able to tell that this occured by looking at the version tab on the binary properties.
Ah, yes, and we all know that users have nothing better to do than spend their whole day clicking through "binary property tabs", trying to see whether the software they just installed has the right version numbers. Sorry, but Torr and you should get a clue.
In other words, I could rename the Microsoft Bob installer to the same name as the Mozilla installer, give it to you to download, and you wouldn't have a clue that it wasn't Mozilla until you ran the program.
You could. But you haven't. In fact, there is no big crime wave of criminals replacing Mozilla dowloads with Microsoft Bob installers. Ergo, it's not currently a big problem in practice.
It isn't supposed to. But congrats on completely missing the point. The point is that when you download Mozilla you don't have a way to verify that you really downloaded Mozilla.
No, you are missing the point. The point is that Microsoft is wasting time on fixing hypothetical problems while failing to fix their actual security problems adequately.
another demonstration of Microsoft's ignorance
on
How Can I Trust Firefox?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The thing to look at is the record, plain and simple. And the record shows that, until now, code signing does not address the major security problems that people have with IE. Maybe that will change in the future, but that's the record so far.
Firefox on Windows does not have code signing because the real world has not demanded it so far. If there were enough attacks for which it turned out that code signing was the right solution, then Firefox would use code signing.
Code signing, at this point, is a gimmick because it does not address the major security problems that Microsoft has. It's a solution to a problem that is not at the top of the list of problems with Microsoft software. And because Microsoft focuses on gimmicks, Microsoft keeps failing to address the real security problems Microsoft products have.
Maybe Microsoft will eventually get serious and real about security, but Peter Torr's commentary illustrates that ignorance still reigns supreme at Microsoft.
This whole interface consistency thing is one of those subtle things about the Mac that makes Mac people wonder how the rest of the world lives without it, while the rest of the world wonders what the big deal is.
The Mac ships with Classic, Carbon, Cocoa, and Swing, and for Cocoa applications, Apple ships two separate kinds of apps (metallic and plastic). That makes five different interfaces, with different looks, behaviors, and keybindings, out of the box.
In addition, there are dozens of ports of programs to Mac OS X (even "native" ports) that use their own toolkit (like Firefox and Thunderbird for example).
If I want to close a window, the widget is always in the same place. To copy text, I always press command-C no matter what program I'm in. Every program uses the exact same file chooser,
You're imagining things. There are lots of programs for Macintosh that violate each of those conventions. Apple's own applications don't even use consistent window decorations. Key bindings between Carbon and Cocoa applications are inconsistent. File system access is inconsistent between Carbon and Cocoa and UNIX APIs on the Macintosh. The list just goes on and on.
It's actually impossible to assemble a consistent desktop on your Macintosh--because you always end up with a patchwork of metallic and plastic applications, of Carbon and Cocoa. In comparison, something like KDE is far more consistent, since, unlike Macintosh, you can actually get a complete set of desktop applications and utilities, all with a single look and feel.
Of course, I think consistency is overrated and what the Mac is doing is just fine. But to assert that the Macintosh provides consistency is ridiculous; Macintosh is probably one of the least consistent GUI platforms in common use.
How could this be done? I don't see how you could improve X11 integration to make the apps look native. X11 is a very small protocol that doesn't cover widgets or anything else like that. Apple couldn't magically make OO use native Aqua widgets, standard file dialogs, etc.
OOo doesn't have to use native Aqua widgets in order to look and feel like a native Macintosh application--many other Macintosh apps don't use native widgets either and their users don't even notice. And Carbon and Cocoa applications differ significantly in their look and feel as well.
OOo (as well as standard Gnome and KDE apps) already has most of the facilities built in to look and behave like native Macintosh apps, with little extra work. What Apple would need to provide is (1) X11 starting up automatically when needed on out-of-the-box OS X installs, with no user intervention, and (2) a small X11 extension for OS X-specific desktop integration. The features in (2) could then be used by Gnome and KDE ports to Macintosh to provide better desktop integration.
Apple would get a lot of nice software for very little effort if they improved X11 integration into the Aqua desktop. The reason they don't is probably politics and branding: having Macintosh run lots of open source apps probably just isn't in their interest.
Since Apple is at its core, a hardware company, my gut feeling is that Apple'd like this more, not less, but I'm not the smartest in this whole field. What's your thinking on this?
In what sense do you think Apple is a "hardware company"? Most of their engineering and manufacturing seems to be outsourced.
Apple is primarily a brand, and Aqua/Cocoa is what keeps that brand distinctive. it doesn't matter whether it's better or not, it matters that their customers think it is.
More applications per se don't help Apple: if Macintosh just becomes another platform for running Gnome and KDE apps, Apple loses, even if that actually makes Macintosh a more useful platform.
Perhaps Apple should first embrace open GUI standards and integrate X11 into Aqua rather than treating it like a leper. Integrating X11 into Aqua would be far easier than what they did with Carbon, which is just as foreign to Aqua as X11 is.
Of course, Apple doesn't want to integreate X11 because they know full well that if they provided decent X11 support, 90% of the OS X applications would be X11 based, and that's not in their interest.
But, frankly, it's not clear that Apple wants OOo on their platform either--after all, they have a cozy relationship with Microsoft now.
OS X is the only mainstream OS where cruddy, flat, Win95-style UI won't fly at all.
First of all, what you call "Win95-style" came from UNIX toolkits; and those GUIs were distinguished by using 3D elements. For a decade, Apple's toolkits were completely flat-chested black-and-white until Apple came around to copying to Motif look as well. Then, eventually, Apple went overboard in their quest for a distinctive look and gave us gumdrops; lots of people don't like that look.
Having seen OO on Windows and on various Unixen, it looks like they're doing all of the UI elements themselves, and I'd bet this is a huge sticking point for a native OS X version.
That isn't a problem with OOo: OOo can use Gnome and KDE's style engines and have an appearance that is indistinguishable from other OS X applications.
The "huge sticking point" is that OOo developers probably don't see much point in porting to Apple's native APIs when doing so takes a lot of work and actually gives them less functionality than they already have.
Of course, OOo under X11 on Macintosh sucks, but that's because X11 on Macintosh is poorly integrated. Apple should improve X11 integration on OS X, rather than trying to force everybody to write "native" Cocoa applications.
MacOS X has been the most prevalent Unix desktop for a while now
That's wishful thinking. Apple's recent sales figures have been higher than those for other UNIX systems, but that tells you nothing about installed base.
eInk and Gyricon are up for reflective electronic displays and are already producing them in limited quantities. However, they are far from "amazing" yet; it's a hard problem getting them to work well. And such displays will never be able to reproduce the entire Pantone system; that's a physical impossibility.
It seems like the Java dependencies are becoming increasingly important. But if you have an open source office suite and it depends on a large, proprietary software product like Sun Java to function, then the freedoms you are supposed to get from using FOSS are not guaranteed anymore. Effectively, only the parts of OpenOffice that are usable without Sun Java are FOSS.
Let's hope that FOSS Java-like implementations (Kaffe, RVM, etc.) will become a drop-in replacement for Sun Java for OpenOffice so that all of OpenOffice functionality will be FOSS.
The article has the usual misunderstandings about color calibration.
Now, how to do this properly has been a long-running and continuing debate that started ever since colour film and colour displays were brought to market. How is colour perceived? Does an output device produce a comparable image to the input device? Does the software accurately handle colour? Does the final image look like the original scene?
Well, I'm sure photographers, Photoshop jockeys, and consumers like to debate such things over and over again. However, the answers to those questions are well known.
If I tell you the number of times I've been asked the question, "Why do my prints look nothing like the images on my monitor", then you'll understand why I believe monitor calibration to be such an important task.
In general, you cannot make prints look like images on the monitor: they have a different gamut and their appearance depends on illumination and many other factors. Making prints look correct requires a lot of skill and experience and monitor calibration is not sufficient (it's not even necessary, actually, if you know what you are doing).
If you want to spend your life in perpetual anxiety and give yourself ulcers over things that you and I have very little influence over, then by all means knock yourself out
You have no basis on which to assess whether I spend my life "in perpetual anxiety".
But you have to admit there are a lot of gaps in some of these climate studies, and I think the guy who started this thread succinctly pointed out one of them.
Those kinds of assertions are irrelevant distractions. Basic physics, as well as a lot of actual data, tell us that continued growth of greenhouse gas emissions is completely irresponsible.
Climate changes have taken place without the assistance of human beings for a very long time. And as another poster pointed out, it's probably more practical to find ways to adapt to climate changes
You try "adapting" to living in a desert or to much of Europe being covered in glaciers (another possible consequence of global warming).
than to try to affect them ourselves.
We are affecting the climate ourselves already--that is, after all, the problem; that's what we need to stop doing.
All the while, of course, trying to find ways to clean our own act up (hint: that's not going to happen overnight).
It's not going to happen at all if people don't start seeing this issue for the serious threat it is.
Would you find this "impressive" if it was implemented in C++ on Windows? In Java? In C#? In ActiveX? In Gnome?
What's "impressive" about this is that it's done in Javascript and works across some browsers. But that's more of a testament to the low expectations people have of Javascript. And the solution to that is for a few browser developers to improve Javascript and its rendering capabilities, not for hundreds of thousands of developers to keep trying to work around its limitations.
$3 billion or however much it was, 6 years of waiting and now they can't figure out what the pictures are showing.
Of course, they can't figure out what these pictures are showing. It often takes years to evaluate that kind of data fully and come to conclusions. That's to be expected when embarking on new scientific territory. We may not even get the answers we seek with Huygens either. It may take many more probes to get an idea of what Titan is like; we don't even know yet what's seeping out of the crater walls on Mars.
With how much has been invested in this mission, I'm sure the scientists are going crazy to present the public with findings (or at least the PR people are)
They are getting data from publicly funded instruments and they are putting it on the web as soon as they can. They are also annotating it with their first impressions and theories. That doesn't mean that they are "going crazy", it means that you are seeing science in action: raw data, hypotheses, debates, and all that. These people are doing a great job. I really don't see what your problem is with all that.
Until then, quit confusing me.
Just don't look, then; you'll get the Discovery channel version quickly enough.
I'm glad to see that the unmanned-space-exploration-mafia has not been able to completely silence the drive for manned space exploration - yet.
The "mafia" here is the people who want manned space exploration, because they are going against widespread scientific consensus to get public money for personal financial gains and glory.
What the hell happened to the human will to explore and survive?
We should apply that "will" here at home first. If we can't keep the ecology of a planet as hospitable as the earth in balance, we sure as hell won't be able to do it on a martian colony.
What's the point in sending out probes if the information gained will certainly be lost in the (near) future when the big one hits the earth?
The probability of "the big one" hitting earth in the "near future" seem much smaller than probability of man-made climate disaster, ecological disaster, or disease, causing global devastation. But in either case, enough human beings probably will survive to rebuild. And we could actually prevent the man-made disasters if people behaved a bit more rationally.
In any case, science doesn't have a universally agreed "point" or long-term goal. Some people do it out of vanity, some out of interest, some out of long-term plans for human beings, some because it's a job. I'd be doing science even if I knew the world would end in a week.
Young equates a major catastrophe with "wiping out" the human race. They are not the same. Massive volcanism or a meteor impact may wipe out 99.99% of all humans, but that's not the same as wiping out the human race. Furthermore, if we have colonies on the planets, still 99.99% of the human race would be wiped out.
His statistics also make little sense given the geological record. Global catastrophes do occur with some regularity. But we are a species that is adapted to the most extreme environments and found all over the globe; the chances of an event that wipes out a species like ours is much, much smaller.
Young is an aeronautical engineer, not a statistician, not an evolutionary biologist, not an ecologist, and not a geologist. And it shows: Young simply lacks the qualifications to make statements like these. He is actually a poster-child for the arrogance and ignorance that has been present among big, old-school engineers and that has caused one big ecological disaster after another throughout the 20th century. Of course, wasting money on "space colonization" won't cause ecological disasters on earth, but it will greatly slow down valuable unmanned scientific exploration of space, because the two are in competition.
So, you think the potential death of billions is funny? Many, you have some messed up sense of humor.
They see everything that deviates from their point of view as a personal attack,
That's the point: it's not my "personal" point of view, it's the mainstream scientific point of view.
What the kind of "humor" that started this thread is, on the other hand, is thinly veiled political propaganda by a few people with vested interests that just don't want to face scientific facts. And people like you spread that kind of meme because you think that the universe and laws of physics are intruding on your God-given right to do whatever you damned well please without consequences.
As I was saying: laugh while you can, monkey boy. (But, since you obviously have no understanding of humor, you probably don't even get that reference.)
That's about as "funny" as making jokes about Bhopal or Chernobyl, except that those are history; this is history in the making and has a good chance of killing billions of people and wiping entire nations off the face of this earth.
People have to stop working themselves up into lather, foaming at the mouth, and laugh at the occasional gems of wit that we come across
Even if it were about a subject where it would be appropriate to make jokes, that kind of "wit" is just plain stupid.
NOT EVERYTHING IS A PERSONAL POLITICAL ATTACK LEVELED AT YOU!!
Nothing in my response indicated that I took the posting to be a "personal attack". In fact, I took it for what it is: an indication that the poster is ill-informed and has a political agenda to push.
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Signing doesn't prevent anything.
Well, gee, good that you actually realize that.
It gives the user the tools necessary to make an educated decision instead of rolling the dice.
Most real-world users are incapable of making educated decisions; therefore, code signing is a useless security measure for most users. (And the ones that could make educated decisions would prefer not to be bothered by this sort of noise.)
Care to elaborate on that point?
Given the number of unsigned components people have to install on their Windows machines in order to get them to run, Microsoft is clearly unable to enforce that all software is consistently signed. As a result, Windows users are constantly bothered by pointless warnings about unsigned code, and important warnings are drowned out by all that noise.
So, which is better? One point which has to be monitored, or every point between the build machine and the location stamping the cds
What is better is to use a sensible and effective way of preventing infections and security problems. Linux manages to do that, Microsoft doesn't.
As opposed to your statements, which I think are based in some sort of fantasy land where the bad guys only try to exploit problems after they've been fixed...
Microsoft should fix the pervasive actual security problems with their software first and then worry about the hypothetical ones.
As I was saying, the proof is in the pudding. In the end, signed or not, using Firefox on Windows is more secure than using IE on Windows, to the limited degree that using anything on Windows can ever be secure. The most secure choice, however, is to run Firefox on Linux.
So all of those email worms don't entice users to open the attachment by naming their payload as awesomescreensaver.exe huh?
Well, since Microsoft now uses code signing, it is obvious that code signing is neither necessary nor sufficient for preventing that sort of thing. In fact, Microsoft's inept use of code signing actually aggravates the problem.
I suppose you don't recall an incident years ago where some virus managed to make its way onto a cd and onto store shelves.
Yes, and with code signing in place, the developer would have signed the virus-infested application and still shipped it.
A hole is a hole. Saying "well, it isn't a problem yet" doesn't change that.
Thanks for stating again so clearly your fundamental lack of understanding of security.
Apache2's Windows [...] uses a standard MSI package and is very polished.
.conf file but it's full of documentation and I was able to teach myself quite a bit just by reading the comments in that file and Googling where necessary.
.conf files (I know that perfectly well), it's that even if you know what to put there, you still have to deal with hundreds of options, dozens of modules, and lots of weird interactions between them all. Apache configuration is far more complex than it ought to be because it provides flexibility in areas where even fairly complex sites just don't need flexibility.
Well, and Linux packages are even more polished than MSI; that's not what I was referring to.
you have to edit the
The problem isn't knowing what to put in the
PHP prides itself on being an easy-to-use language for web applications, and it succeeds. Unfortunately, Apache hasn't become any easier to install and configure between 1.x and 2.x; in fact, if anything, I think it has gotten overall worse. That's why Apache 1.x is a better match to PHP than Apache 2.x. If Apache wants 2.x to be a better match with PHP, then Apache needs to address the problems the PHP community sees with 2.x.
Personally, I'd like to see more server alternatives to Apache anyway. I think there should be a handful of FOSS web servers capable of hosting PHP, web servers that make different kinds of tradeoffs between performance, security, and ease-of-use. The huge market share that Apache has, from my point of view, is a problem, just like the huge market share that Microsoft has in other areas.
That would be a limitation imposed by "limiations"/lack of functionality on the unix side. [...] The only comprehensive solution I can think of would involve placing all of the information required to verify the authenticity of a binary in the file itself in a manner which cannot be modified once it gets "signed." Which is pretty much what binary signing does in the Windows world.
Linux packages contain complete version information, documentation, and dependencies. When you sign a package, you sign all of that. Furthermore, the installer will make sure that you are, in fact, installing the latest version, unless you explicitly tell it not to. Microsoft's packaging system is inferior to the Linux packaging systems in pretty much every respect, including security. Sorry, try again.
In the Windows world, you'd be easily able to tell that this occured by looking at the version tab on the binary properties.
Ah, yes, and we all know that users have nothing better to do than spend their whole day clicking through "binary property tabs", trying to see whether the software they just installed has the right version numbers. Sorry, but Torr and you should get a clue.
In other words, I could rename the Microsoft Bob installer to the same name as the Mozilla installer, give it to you to download, and you wouldn't have a clue that it wasn't Mozilla until you ran the program.
You could. But you haven't. In fact, there is no big crime wave of criminals replacing Mozilla dowloads with Microsoft Bob installers. Ergo, it's not currently a big problem in practice.
It isn't supposed to. But congrats on completely missing the point. The point is that when you download Mozilla you don't have a way to verify that you really downloaded Mozilla.
No, you are missing the point. The point is that Microsoft is wasting time on fixing hypothetical problems while failing to fix their actual security problems adequately.
The thing to look at is the record, plain and simple. And the record shows that, until now, code signing does not address the major security problems that people have with IE. Maybe that will change in the future, but that's the record so far.
Firefox on Windows does not have code signing because the real world has not demanded it so far. If there were enough attacks for which it turned out that code signing was the right solution, then Firefox would use code signing.
Code signing, at this point, is a gimmick because it does not address the major security problems that Microsoft has. It's a solution to a problem that is not at the top of the list of problems with Microsoft software. And because Microsoft focuses on gimmicks, Microsoft keeps failing to address the real security problems Microsoft products have.
Maybe Microsoft will eventually get serious and real about security, but Peter Torr's commentary illustrates that ignorance still reigns supreme at Microsoft.
This whole interface consistency thing is one of those subtle things about the Mac that makes Mac people wonder how the rest of the world lives without it, while the rest of the world wonders what the big deal is.
The Mac ships with Classic, Carbon, Cocoa, and Swing, and for Cocoa applications, Apple ships two separate kinds of apps (metallic and plastic). That makes five different interfaces, with different looks, behaviors, and keybindings, out of the box.
In addition, there are dozens of ports of programs to Mac OS X (even "native" ports) that use their own toolkit (like Firefox and Thunderbird for example).
If I want to close a window, the widget is always in the same place. To copy text, I always press command-C no matter what program I'm in. Every program uses the exact same file chooser,
You're imagining things. There are lots of programs for Macintosh that violate each of those conventions. Apple's own applications don't even use consistent window decorations. Key bindings between Carbon and Cocoa applications are inconsistent. File system access is inconsistent between Carbon and Cocoa and UNIX APIs on the Macintosh. The list just goes on and on.
It's actually impossible to assemble a consistent desktop on your Macintosh--because you always end up with a patchwork of metallic and plastic applications, of Carbon and Cocoa. In comparison, something like KDE is far more consistent, since, unlike Macintosh, you can actually get a complete set of desktop applications and utilities, all with a single look and feel.
Of course, I think consistency is overrated and what the Mac is doing is just fine. But to assert that the Macintosh provides consistency is ridiculous; Macintosh is probably one of the least consistent GUI platforms in common use.
Sorry, that should have been:
"having Macintosh run lots of open source apps based only on open source APIs probably just isn't in their interest."
Of course, Apple loves it when you develop open source apps to their proprietary APIs.
How could this be done? I don't see how you could improve X11 integration to make the apps look native. X11 is a very small protocol that doesn't cover widgets or anything else like that. Apple couldn't magically make OO use native Aqua widgets, standard file dialogs, etc.
OOo doesn't have to use native Aqua widgets in order to look and feel like a native Macintosh application--many other Macintosh apps don't use native widgets either and their users don't even notice. And Carbon and Cocoa applications differ significantly in their look and feel as well.
OOo (as well as standard Gnome and KDE apps) already has most of the facilities built in to look and behave like native Macintosh apps, with little extra work. What Apple would need to provide is (1) X11 starting up automatically when needed on out-of-the-box OS X installs, with no user intervention, and (2) a small X11 extension for OS X-specific desktop integration. The features in (2) could then be used by Gnome and KDE ports to Macintosh to provide better desktop integration.
Apple would get a lot of nice software for very little effort if they improved X11 integration into the Aqua desktop. The reason they don't is probably politics and branding: having Macintosh run lots of open source apps probably just isn't in their interest.
Since Apple is at its core, a hardware company, my gut feeling is that Apple'd like this more, not less, but I'm not the smartest in this whole field. What's your thinking on this?
In what sense do you think Apple is a "hardware company"? Most of their engineering and manufacturing seems to be outsourced.
Apple is primarily a brand, and Aqua/Cocoa is what keeps that brand distinctive. it doesn't matter whether it's better or not, it matters that their customers think it is.
More applications per se don't help Apple: if Macintosh just becomes another platform for running Gnome and KDE apps, Apple loses, even if that actually makes Macintosh a more useful platform.
Perhaps Apple should first embrace open GUI standards and integrate X11 into Aqua rather than treating it like a leper. Integrating X11 into Aqua would be far easier than what they did with Carbon, which is just as foreign to Aqua as X11 is.
Of course, Apple doesn't want to integreate X11 because they know full well that if they provided decent X11 support, 90% of the OS X applications would be X11 based, and that's not in their interest.
But, frankly, it's not clear that Apple wants OOo on their platform either--after all, they have a cozy relationship with Microsoft now.
OS X is the only mainstream OS where cruddy, flat, Win95-style UI won't fly at all.
First of all, what you call "Win95-style" came from UNIX toolkits; and those GUIs were distinguished by using 3D elements. For a decade, Apple's toolkits were completely flat-chested black-and-white until Apple came around to copying to Motif look as well. Then, eventually, Apple went overboard in their quest for a distinctive look and gave us gumdrops; lots of people don't like that look.
Having seen OO on Windows and on various Unixen, it looks like they're doing all of the UI elements themselves, and I'd bet this is a huge sticking point for a native OS X version.
That isn't a problem with OOo: OOo can use Gnome and KDE's style engines and have an appearance that is indistinguishable from other OS X applications.
The "huge sticking point" is that OOo developers probably don't see much point in porting to Apple's native APIs when doing so takes a lot of work and actually gives them less functionality than they already have.
Of course, OOo under X11 on Macintosh sucks, but that's because X11 on Macintosh is poorly integrated. Apple should improve X11 integration on OS X, rather than trying to force everybody to write "native" Cocoa applications.
MacOS X has been the most prevalent Unix desktop for a while now
That's wishful thinking. Apple's recent sales figures have been higher than those for other UNIX systems, but that tells you nothing about installed base.
eInk and Gyricon are up for reflective electronic displays and are already producing them in limited quantities. However, they are far from "amazing" yet; it's a hard problem getting them to work well. And such displays will never be able to reproduce the entire Pantone system; that's a physical impossibility.
It seems like the Java dependencies are becoming increasingly important. But if you have an open source office suite and it depends on a large, proprietary software product like Sun Java to function, then the freedoms you are supposed to get from using FOSS are not guaranteed anymore. Effectively, only the parts of OpenOffice that are usable without Sun Java are FOSS.
Let's hope that FOSS Java-like implementations (Kaffe, RVM, etc.) will become a drop-in replacement for Sun Java for OpenOffice so that all of OpenOffice functionality will be FOSS.
The article has the usual misunderstandings about color calibration.
Now, how to do this properly has been a long-running and continuing debate that started ever since colour film and colour displays were brought to market. How is colour perceived? Does an output device produce a comparable image to the input device? Does the software accurately handle colour? Does the final image look like the original scene?
Well, I'm sure photographers, Photoshop jockeys, and consumers like to debate such things over and over again. However, the answers to those questions are well known.
If I tell you the number of times I've been asked the question, "Why do my prints look nothing like the images on my monitor", then you'll understand why I believe monitor calibration to be such an important task.
In general, you cannot make prints look like images on the monitor: they have a different gamut and their appearance depends on illumination and many other factors. Making prints look correct requires a lot of skill and experience and monitor calibration is not sufficient (it's not even necessary, actually, if you know what you are doing).
If you want to spend your life in perpetual anxiety and give yourself ulcers over things that you and I have very little influence over, then by all means knock yourself out
You have no basis on which to assess whether I spend my life "in perpetual anxiety".
But you have to admit there are a lot of gaps in some of these climate studies, and I think the guy who started this thread succinctly pointed out one of them.
Those kinds of assertions are irrelevant distractions. Basic physics, as well as a lot of actual data, tell us that continued growth of greenhouse gas emissions is completely irresponsible.
Climate changes have taken place without the assistance of human beings for a very long time. And as another poster pointed out, it's probably more practical to find ways to adapt to climate changes
You try "adapting" to living in a desert or to much of Europe being covered in glaciers (another possible consequence of global warming).
than to try to affect them ourselves.
We are affecting the climate ourselves already--that is, after all, the problem; that's what we need to stop doing.
All the while, of course, trying to find ways to clean our own act up (hint: that's not going to happen overnight).
It's not going to happen at all if people don't start seeing this issue for the serious threat it is.
Would you find this "impressive" if it was implemented in C++ on Windows? In Java? In C#? In ActiveX? In Gnome?
What's "impressive" about this is that it's done in Javascript and works across some browsers. But that's more of a testament to the low expectations people have of Javascript. And the solution to that is for a few browser developers to improve Javascript and its rendering capabilities, not for hundreds of thousands of developers to keep trying to work around its limitations.
$3 billion or however much it was, 6 years of waiting and now they can't figure out what the pictures are showing.
Of course, they can't figure out what these pictures are showing. It often takes years to evaluate that kind of data fully and come to conclusions. That's to be expected when embarking on new scientific territory. We may not even get the answers we seek with Huygens either. It may take many more probes to get an idea of what Titan is like; we don't even know yet what's seeping out of the crater walls on Mars.
With how much has been invested in this mission, I'm sure the scientists are going crazy to present the public with findings (or at least the PR people are)
They are getting data from publicly funded instruments and they are putting it on the web as soon as they can. They are also annotating it with their first impressions and theories. That doesn't mean that they are "going crazy", it means that you are seeing science in action: raw data, hypotheses, debates, and all that. These people are doing a great job. I really don't see what your problem is with all that.
Until then, quit confusing me.
Just don't look, then; you'll get the Discovery channel version quickly enough.
With the new ruling, pretty much everyone but the government has to change the way in which stock options are recorded.
:-)
The government gives out stock options???
I'm glad to see that the unmanned-space-exploration-mafia has not been able to completely silence the drive for manned space exploration - yet.
The "mafia" here is the people who want manned space exploration, because they are going against widespread scientific consensus to get public money for personal financial gains and glory.
What the hell happened to the human will to explore and survive?
We should apply that "will" here at home first. If we can't keep the ecology of a planet as hospitable as the earth in balance, we sure as hell won't be able to do it on a martian colony.
What's the point in sending out probes if the information gained will certainly be lost in the (near) future when the big one hits the earth?
The probability of "the big one" hitting earth in the "near future" seem much smaller than probability of man-made climate disaster, ecological disaster, or disease, causing global devastation. But in either case, enough human beings probably will survive to rebuild. And we could actually prevent the man-made disasters if people behaved a bit more rationally.
In any case, science doesn't have a universally agreed "point" or long-term goal. Some people do it out of vanity, some out of interest, some out of long-term plans for human beings, some because it's a job. I'd be doing science even if I knew the world would end in a week.
Young equates a major catastrophe with "wiping out" the human race. They are not the same. Massive volcanism or a meteor impact may wipe out 99.99% of all humans, but that's not the same as wiping out the human race. Furthermore, if we have colonies on the planets, still 99.99% of the human race would be wiped out.
His statistics also make little sense given the geological record. Global catastrophes do occur with some regularity. But we are a species that is adapted to the most extreme environments and found all over the globe; the chances of an event that wipes out a species like ours is much, much smaller.
Young is an aeronautical engineer, not a statistician, not an evolutionary biologist, not an ecologist, and not a geologist. And it shows: Young simply lacks the qualifications to make statements like these. He is actually a poster-child for the arrogance and ignorance that has been present among big, old-school engineers and that has caused one big ecological disaster after another throughout the 20th century. Of course, wasting money on "space colonization" won't cause ecological disasters on earth, but it will greatly slow down valuable unmanned scientific exploration of space, because the two are in competition.
I think people like him are beyond humor.
So, you think the potential death of billions is funny? Many, you have some messed up sense of humor.
They see everything that deviates from their point of view as a personal attack,
That's the point: it's not my "personal" point of view, it's the mainstream scientific point of view.
What the kind of "humor" that started this thread is, on the other hand, is thinly veiled political propaganda by a few people with vested interests that just don't want to face scientific facts. And people like you spread that kind of meme because you think that the universe and laws of physics are intruding on your God-given right to do whatever you damned well please without consequences.
As I was saying: laugh while you can, monkey boy. (But, since you obviously have no understanding of humor, you probably don't even get that reference.)
It's funny! Laugh!
That's about as "funny" as making jokes about Bhopal or Chernobyl, except that those are history; this is history in the making and has a good chance of killing billions of people and wiping entire nations off the face of this earth.
People have to stop working themselves up into lather, foaming at the mouth, and laugh at the occasional gems of wit that we come across
Even if it were about a subject where it would be appropriate to make jokes, that kind of "wit" is just plain stupid.
NOT EVERYTHING IS A PERSONAL POLITICAL ATTACK LEVELED AT YOU!!
Nothing in my response indicated that I took the posting to be a "personal attack". In fact, I took it for what it is: an indication that the poster is ill-informed and has a political agenda to push.