If others were to "fix" it, they would be working on a copy, and they would be starting an entirely new fork altogether. I, for one, certainly don't want that to happen.
I think pretty much every distro in existence maintains its own patchset for the vanilla kernel (effectively maintain their own "fork", I guess), and it is not causing any problems. In brief, if Linus does not accept a useful patch (or essential!), the distros will, and so this "forking", if you can really call it that, will have no negative effect on the end-user.
I knocked up some crappy Java client a while back. What differentiates it from Freeguide is that it sources all of its UK listings from one place (provided, for free, by a member of this very site, no less:)). If you're interested, e-mail me at my username minus the underscore at hotmail.com.
It's very rough around the edges (as I got tied up with work, and couldn't continue to work on it:( ), but it works decently enough, although the provided listings are occasionally wrong. Here's a screenie.
I think the implication is that Microsoft are lazy and arrogant (having previously dismissed tabs as being useless, and stating that "their customers did not want them"). Microsoft have allowed their browser to languish horribly, to the detriment of the users that they apparently hold in high-esteem, and the only thing that has gotten them to actually make any improvements is the threat of losing market share. Microsoft will now, of course, crow about their revolutionary new Tabbed Browsing(TM) feature that they have provided to enhance your browsing experience, and the unknowing masses will fall for it hook, line and sinker, praising Microsoft as an innovative company who puts the needs of its customers first. This is what, I think, gets most people's goat.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: there is something utterly, utterly wrong somewhere with Microsoft's PR department. This utterly bizarre instance just adds further weight to the theory. Honestly, you simply could not make this shit up!
We all know that teachers like to pass-the-buck, but that's ridiculous. If four hours of television destroys all that your eight hours of class time imparts on a child, then you're a crappy teacher, district or administration.
Or perhaps slickly-packaged, sound-bite-laden propaganda is far more persuasive than well- thought-out, clearly expressed tuition that requires you to think could ever be?
On a similar note, does anyone known of any good USB WIFI (not Bluetooth) dongles (preferably the "pen"-type of form factor, rather than the great big buggers!) that work under Linux, preferably without ndiswrapper? I'm going to buy a shuttle for my media box, and they only have two PCI slots which will be used up by my TV out and TV in cards, and I'd also like Wireless connectivity. It seems that this is something of a tall order, alas - I was trawling for *hours* yesterday trying to find one that fit all these criteria:(
Friend, I've installed both Windows and at least three different distros of Linux. You're smoking crack. Linux is considerably more difficult to install and configure
As always, neither side is correct every time - it depends entirely on the situation. For example, consider my desktop computer.
My desktop computer consists of a bunch of random hardware, only one item of which was specifically chosen (my PCI wireless card). I have two SATA drives; straightaway Windows is at a disadvantage, as to be able to install Windows at all I would need to use a floppy drive for the manufacturer.
So I insert the Linux CD, reboot, answer a few easy questions (what part of the world I live in; language I speak etc), and am asked whether I want to dual-boot or just take up the whole drive. I select "whole drive" and am asked to either configure the partitioning myself, or leave it up to the installer. I leave it up to the installer (interestingly,/home has its own partition). A few misc, easy questions later, and it does its stuff - I have decently fast harddrives, so by the time its given me a complete desktop environment with two office suites, god knows how many programming languages, a nice selection of "play once and forget" games (including solitaire and Minesweeper clones, of course:)) and countless handy apps to play around with (all neatly categorised in the start menu), 15 minutes have passed, of which I was actually required to do something for about 2 minutes. Upon first boot:
- Desktop is running smoothly at 1024x768, thanks to the open source nv nvidia drivers that are part of the kernel and which were automatically set up for me.
- Sound works perfectly - no intervention of any kind from me was required.
- My TV card works perfectly - again, no intervention required.
- My SATA drives of course work perfectly (no need for the manufacturers floppies).
- I plug in my USB scanner and crank up Xsane gimp - straight away I can scan, with no need to hunt for drivers (of which there are no official XP versions, by the way - you have to go to some guys personal site to get them).
- Printer works as soon as it is plugged in; no looking for drivers here, either (I'm not sure if there are XP drivers for this model anymore).
- Clicking the icon that looks like a globe brings up a webbrowser. Typing in google.com takes me to google.com, as my wireless card was automatically detected and the relevant driver (part of the kernel) loaded and configured, with the connection occuring transparently through DHCP. Just as well, as I have no knowledge of networking whatsoever.
- Checking for updates via Synaptic is effortless. Installing software is blissful : search for the name, click, select install and repeat for every piece of software you want. Or just browse the categorised list of thousands of apps. When you've made all your selections, click Apply and go and make a up of tea or something while they are all downloaded and installed, without having to track down a single website, read a single EULA or perform a single click-through. My system drive, now absolutely stuffed to the gills with IDEs, web-browsers, office suites, mini-games etc now takes up about 3.5 GB.
The decision to mount/home on a separate partitions is very handy, as all of my personal settings for every app (e.g. extensions for Firefox, menus, stuff I want in the Kicker, etc) and all of my e-mails etc are *religiously* placed there - re-install linux at this point and your desktop will be identical.
I could go on, but you get the picture; if you win what I like to call the Linux Hardware Lottery, and abandon the Windows way of installing software (try it in Linux and you will know pain like you've never known before!;)), then everything is a dream - including keeping your system up to date, of course, as updates to *every app on your system* ar
Of course, this tends to be a non-issue with OSS as people are able to grab the source and modify it to meet their own needs - like those guys who made the GIMP UI much closer to Photoshop in that slashdot story a while back.
Having said that, I agree that OSS tends to suffer from a lack of accountability that traditional commercial software doesn't - could you imagine the head of Photoshop development ignoring vocal demands for feature X from a large contigent of its userbase? It's much, much less likely to happen.
Again, TCPA (the actual hardware-based stuff) is almost entirely redundant. I'm betting the Linux devs could get something like this knocked up in software very easily (if they have not done so already). Then just bung on SELinux with very resticted access to your kernel only, and you're good to go: All of the security benefits to the home user, but, of course, none of the DRM benefits to the **AA etc, which is, of course, the real motivation for TCPA.
That point again - TCPA is at best superfluous for the home user, and at most outright hostile. Giving it a warm, fuzzy, nurturing name like "Trusted Computing" was a stroke of genius.
A whole swathe of them have been fixed in 1.1. Note that the 1.0.x series tend to be security fixes and minor bug-fixes only, so you won't be seeing these fixes in any of the 1.0.x updates. If you want to live life on the bleeding edge (and have none of your extensions work;)) try downloading a nightly - there are apparently quiet a few speed & responsiveness tweaks, in addition to less memory leakage.
They do, to an extent (but this does not magically prevent a product from *being released* without bugs), and yes it does, just like all software. It's worth noting that most (all?) of these bugs have been found precisely by these eyes that are looking over the code.
Oh, and hats off to the Firefox devs for the scorching turnover on this flaw. When Firefox 1.1 comes out (with its more diff-style updated) the process will be even more streamlined and painless.
Note that all of your extensions, bookmarks, themes etc are stored in one directory (on Windows, it's in %appdata%/firefox/, or something - I do't have access to a Windows machine right now) so you just need to carry this directory around with you - no need to manually install extensions etc every time you do a new install.
Excellent analysis. Wish I could mod you up, but hopefully others will take it upon themselves to do this. There is some light at the end of the tunnel, however; I gather that the installed version of Firefox spans several small-ish files, and that the next Firefox version (i.e. 1.1 onwards) will be geared towards swapping out just the files that cause the problem, alleviating the large downloads (and general inelegance) of performing a full download & re-install every time a patch is required.
And everyone will say ":oh no firefox is a security risk" whaaaa. well this isnt really the case and is overstating things just a bit. When it comes down to it firefox still has many quicker fixes and the bug is probably already fixed by now.
Perhaps the bug is already fixed in the dev tree, but this is irrelevant if the fix takes 3 months to deploy to users. Hopefully, the fixes to the auto-update system coming up in 1.1 (where a "security fix" does not consist simply of "re-install the whole of Firefox with this new version") will make the whole deployment aspect faster. Although I have to say, Firefox 1.0.3 seemed to follow quite quickly on the heels of 1.0.2, which is encouraging!:)
I'm using Linux too, but from what I hear, a significant amount of Windows users are completely and totally failing to trigger the exploit. Have any Windows users managed to get it to actually work, yet?
This is certainly unsatisfactory, but I don't see it as a problem, myself. It's worth noting that I can load up KDE, Firefox and a bunch of Konqueror File Manager instances, gaim (which does not used Qt, I don't think), two tabbed Konsoles, a Swing/Java app I wrote for myself, the Gnome System Monitor etc on my 256MB laptop and not touch swap (in fact, I botched the install and forget to add a swap partition - doh!). Don't give too much credence to the reported memory usage; things are much more complex than the numbers reported, and remember that Linux does not like having RAM free (as it is viewed as wasteful) so expands its (apparent) memory consumption according to how much is available.
What is "fragmented" about it? If you have a computer with more than 256MB of RAM, then you can happily run either KDE or GNOME - the difference is merely one of personal preferences. An application written for GNOME works damn-near perfectly under KDE, and vice-versa, due in large part to the efforts of freedesktop.org. If you are talking about distros, then the only two that a "Joe Sixpack"-type of home user will need to know about are Ubuntu and SUSE (I'd go with Ubunutu, personally). Granted, packages are not interoperable between the two, but since both have good, up-to-date versions of the same software a mouse-click away, who cares?
I'm sorry, but I'm just really not seeing this supposed "fragmentation" as a barrier to Linux on the desktop.
I suspect it means "pass the Sun certification", or suchlike i.e. to be sufficiently complete an implementation of a Java VM as to be approved by Sun itself. If this is the case, then this is a very odd choice of words. I'd be very, very surprised if the ASF would try to "embrace and extend" in this way.
Why can't OO embrace and extend the.doc format, rather than inventing something new?
Rage...rising...!
Over and over again I see the same arguments - "OO.o would be great if it did a perfect job of importing/ exporting Word documents"; "Linux would be great if it supported al the printers at Walmart and ran all my Windows software and had loads of games" and every single time I roll my eyes at the...I don't now...arrogance? of people who propound these views as if the Linux/ FOSS community were so stupid and blind that these issues never occurred to them. Honestly, if I see one more whiner ascend to the pulpit and screech at the FOSS community about how the salvation of Linux rests upon [insert blindingly obvious statement here], apparently expecting them to say..."Well, gee, that guy's absolutely right! How did we not think of this before! All hail our new glorious leader!" I'll scream:)
Anyway, rant over - sorry about that, it wasn't aimed at you personally, my friend:)
Anyway, to address your statements more civilly: I'm sure the OO.o developers are acutely aware that they need to import/ export to MS's formats in order to be successful (I'm guessing that they are harangued about it by users every minute of the day, probably with e-mails like "Why do you expect people to use your crappy software when it cannot even open my Word documents. You're hopeless!"). The problem is that it is hard as fuck to interoperate with them as they are closed, messy formats that must be reverse-engineered - a very tricky, time-consuming task. While I'm at it - the Linux community would love to support all the hardware under the sun, expect that hardware manufacturers simply will not provide drivers nor the specs necessary for the community to write their own; Linux won't run all Windows software perfectly as the apps are not written to be portable in the first place so they are forced to re-implement Microsoft's API based on scant documentation (a Herculean effort); and games won't run because games writers use the proprietary DirectX instead of OpenGL and have no interest in aiding porting to Linux.
Oh, and the whole "Embrace and Extend" is a dirty, underhanded scheme designed to stifle competition, and I hope than the OO.o developers never engage in it.
.DOC, as I understand it, is an absolute mess of a format (I've heard from several sources that it represents a straight memory dump of Word, but this is hard to believe). It is also closed and undocumented, and the limited interoperability OO.o has with is has come as the result of years of painstaking reverse-engineering, with no help from Microsoft.
Having an open, well-structured and well-documented format means that all word-processors will be able to write documents that will be (hopefully) perfectly readable in all word processors that implement the standard, and also ensures that we are not tied to the software of a single vendor (which might no longer exist) when we wish to view these documents years down the line (critically important for documents stored by e.g. the Government).
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, apparently FreeGuide uses the same system too, now - disregard parent :)
It's very rough around the edges (as I got tied up with work, and couldn't continue to work on it :( ), but it works decently enough, although the provided listings are occasionally wrong. Here's a screenie.
I think the implication is that Microsoft are lazy and arrogant (having previously dismissed tabs as being useless, and stating that "their customers did not want them"). Microsoft have allowed their browser to languish horribly, to the detriment of the users that they apparently hold in high-esteem, and the only thing that has gotten them to actually make any improvements is the threat of losing market share. Microsoft will now, of course, crow about their revolutionary new Tabbed Browsing(TM) feature that they have provided to enhance your browsing experience, and the unknowing masses will fall for it hook, line and sinker, praising Microsoft as an innovative company who puts the needs of its customers first. This is what, I think, gets most people's goat.
...Microsoft! At this rate, IE will soon be as good as Dillo! ;)
I've said it before and I'll say it again: there is something utterly, utterly wrong somewhere with Microsoft's PR department. This utterly bizarre instance just adds further weight to the theory. Honestly, you simply could not make this shit up!
On a similar note, does anyone known of any good USB WIFI (not Bluetooth) dongles (preferably the "pen"-type of form factor, rather than the great big buggers!) that work under Linux, preferably without ndiswrapper? I'm going to buy a shuttle for my media box, and they only have two PCI slots which will be used up by my TV out and TV in cards, and I'd also like Wireless connectivity. It seems that this is something of a tall order, alas - I was trawling for *hours* yesterday trying to find one that fit all these criteria :(
As always, neither side is correct every time - it depends entirely on the situation. For example, consider my desktop computer.
My desktop computer consists of a bunch of random hardware, only one item of which was specifically chosen (my PCI wireless card). I have two SATA drives; straightaway Windows is at a disadvantage, as to be able to install Windows at all I would need to use a floppy drive for the manufacturer.
So I insert the Linux CD, reboot, answer a few easy questions (what part of the world I live in; language I speak etc), and am asked whether I want to dual-boot or just take up the whole drive. I select "whole drive" and am asked to either configure the partitioning myself, or leave it up to the installer. I leave it up to the installer (interestingly, /home has its own partition). A few misc, easy questions later, and it does its stuff - I have decently fast harddrives, so by the time its given me a complete desktop environment with two office suites, god knows how many programming languages, a nice selection of "play once and forget" games (including solitaire and Minesweeper clones, of course :)) and countless handy apps to play around with (all neatly categorised in the start menu), 15 minutes have passed, of which I was actually required to do something for about 2 minutes. Upon first boot:
- Desktop is running smoothly at 1024x768, thanks to the open source nv nvidia drivers that are part of the kernel and which were automatically set up for me.
- Sound works perfectly - no intervention of any kind from me was required.
- My TV card works perfectly - again, no intervention required.
- My SATA drives of course work perfectly (no need for the manufacturers floppies).
- I plug in my USB scanner and crank up Xsane gimp - straight away I can scan, with no need to hunt for drivers (of which there are no official XP versions, by the way - you have to go to some guys personal site to get them).
- Printer works as soon as it is plugged in; no looking for drivers here, either (I'm not sure if there are XP drivers for this model anymore).
- Clicking the icon that looks like a globe brings up a webbrowser. Typing in google.com takes me to google.com, as my wireless card was automatically detected and the relevant driver (part of the kernel) loaded and configured, with the connection occuring transparently through DHCP. Just as well, as I have no knowledge of networking whatsoever.
- Checking for updates via Synaptic is effortless. Installing software is blissful : search for the name, click, select install and repeat for every piece of software you want. Or just browse the categorised list of thousands of apps. When you've made all your selections, click Apply and go and make a up of tea or something while they are all downloaded and installed, without having to track down a single website, read a single EULA or perform a single click-through. My system drive, now absolutely stuffed to the gills with IDEs, web-browsers, office suites, mini-games etc now takes up about 3.5 GB.
The decision to mount /home on a separate partitions is very handy, as all of my personal settings for every app (e.g. extensions for Firefox, menus, stuff I want in the Kicker, etc) and all of my e-mails etc are *religiously* placed there - re-install linux at this point and your desktop will be identical.
I could go on, but you get the picture; if you win what I like to call the Linux Hardware Lottery, and abandon the Windows way of installing software (try it in Linux and you will know pain like you've never known before! ;)), then everything is a dream - including keeping your system up to date, of course, as updates to *every app on your system* ar
Having said that, I agree that OSS tends to suffer from a lack of accountability that traditional commercial software doesn't - could you imagine the head of Photoshop development ignoring vocal demands for feature X from a large contigent of its userbase? It's much, much less likely to happen.
That point again - TCPA is at best superfluous for the home user, and at most outright hostile. Giving it a warm, fuzzy, nurturing name like "Trusted Computing" was a stroke of genius.
A whole swathe of them have been fixed in 1.1. Note that the 1.0.x series tend to be security fixes and minor bug-fixes only, so you won't be seeing these fixes in any of the 1.0.x updates. If you want to live life on the bleeding edge (and have none of your extensions work ;)) try downloading a nightly - there are apparently quiet a few speed & responsiveness tweaks, in addition to less memory leakage.
Oh, and hats off to the Firefox devs for the scorching turnover on this flaw. When Firefox 1.1 comes out (with its more diff-style updated) the process will be even more streamlined and painless.
Note that all of your extensions, bookmarks, themes etc are stored in one directory (on Windows, it's in %appdata%/firefox/, or something - I do't have access to a Windows machine right now) so you just need to carry this directory around with you - no need to manually install extensions etc every time you do a new install.
Excellent analysis. Wish I could mod you up, but hopefully others will take it upon themselves to do this. There is some light at the end of the tunnel, however; I gather that the installed version of Firefox spans several small-ish files, and that the next Firefox version (i.e. 1.1 onwards) will be geared towards swapping out just the files that cause the problem, alleviating the large downloads (and general inelegance) of performing a full download & re-install every time a patch is required.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/28/03 1248
I'm using Linux too, but from what I hear, a significant amount of Windows users are completely and totally failing to trigger the exploit. Have any Windows users managed to get it to actually work, yet?
This is certainly unsatisfactory, but I don't see it as a problem, myself. It's worth noting that I can load up KDE, Firefox and a bunch of Konqueror File Manager instances, gaim (which does not used Qt, I don't think), two tabbed Konsoles, a Swing/Java app I wrote for myself, the Gnome System Monitor etc on my 256MB laptop and not touch swap (in fact, I botched the install and forget to add a swap partition - doh!). Don't give too much credence to the reported memory usage; things are much more complex than the numbers reported, and remember that Linux does not like having RAM free (as it is viewed as wasteful) so expands its (apparent) memory consumption according to how much is available.
I'm sorry, but I'm just really not seeing this supposed "fragmentation" as a barrier to Linux on the desktop.
I suspect it means "pass the Sun certification", or suchlike i.e. to be sufficiently complete an implementation of a Java VM as to be approved by Sun itself. If this is the case, then this is a very odd choice of words. I'd be very, very surprised if the ASF would try to "embrace and extend" in this way.
The target audience for the OGP are the kind of people who can sniff out "evaporware" from 100ft. This won't be an issue, I don't think.
Over and over again I see the same arguments - "OO.o would be great if it did a perfect job of importing/ exporting Word documents"; "Linux would be great if it supported al the printers at Walmart and ran all my Windows software and had loads of games" and every single time I roll my eyes at the...I don't now...arrogance? of people who propound these views as if the Linux/ FOSS community were so stupid and blind that these issues never occurred to them. Honestly, if I see one more whiner ascend to the pulpit and screech at the FOSS community about how the salvation of Linux rests upon [insert blindingly obvious statement here], apparently expecting them to say..."Well, gee, that guy's absolutely right! How did we not think of this before! All hail our new glorious leader!" I'll scream :)
Anyway, rant over - sorry about that, it wasn't aimed at you personally, my friend :)
Anyway, to address your statements more civilly: I'm sure the OO.o developers are acutely aware that they need to import/ export to MS's formats in order to be successful (I'm guessing that they are harangued about it by users every minute of the day, probably with e-mails like "Why do you expect people to use your crappy software when it cannot even open my Word documents. You're hopeless!"). The problem is that it is hard as fuck to interoperate with them as they are closed, messy formats that must be reverse-engineered - a very tricky, time-consuming task. While I'm at it - the Linux community would love to support all the hardware under the sun, expect that hardware manufacturers simply will not provide drivers nor the specs necessary for the community to write their own; Linux won't run all Windows software perfectly as the apps are not written to be portable in the first place so they are forced to re-implement Microsoft's API based on scant documentation (a Herculean effort); and games won't run because games writers use the proprietary DirectX instead of OpenGL and have no interest in aiding porting to Linux.
Phew - that felt good :) For a little more on my opinion on why .doc needs to die and be replaced with a decent format, see here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=148300&cid=124 30161
Oh, and the whole "Embrace and Extend" is a dirty, underhanded scheme designed to stifle competition, and I hope than the OO.o developers never engage in it.
Having an open, well-structured and well-documented format means that all word-processors will be able to write documents that will be (hopefully) perfectly readable in all word processors that implement the standard, and also ensures that we are not tied to the software of a single vendor (which might no longer exist) when we wish to view these documents years down the line (critically important for documents stored by e.g. the Government).