The EU has been coming down particularly hard on Microsoft recently over the closed-ness of its protocols. I have absolutely no idea what this means in the long run (is it an enlightened attempt to prevent getting themselves locked in, or just a means to extort money/ discounts?), but I take heart from the fact that some government somewhere is actually taking a stand against Microsoft over closed formats, rather than simply bending over as has always been the case in the past.
As always, I end with my favourite link that I like to post in situations such as these. If you are cheered by the spectacle of a politician thoroughly demolishing Microsoft FUD, read on!
HP are apparently working on a fork of Ubuntu (which will be merged back into the mainline branch) which supports absolutely 100% (from suspend/ resume/ hibernate to modems to 3D acceleration) of the hardware on some of their laptops, which I find heartening.
This blog-marketing and the recent Longhorn media blitz is in response to the release of OS X Tiger, a platform that has maybe 3% of the market. Can anyone make sense of this paranoic response ?
I think it might be because Apple, a hardware company that spend a fraction as much on their software as Microsoft have, have, according to some well-publicised accounts, produced an OS that is so far ahead of Microsoft's efforts (in terms of Just Works-ness, security, eye-candy, technology, and bundled productivity applications) that it's simply embarassing. Coupled with Apple's mind-share due to the roaring success of the iPod, and the release of the Mac Mini which is relatively affordable (although apparently much more costly per performance than x86 boxes) and the lacklustre reviews of the recent Longhorn developer reviews, the situation has put Microsoft on edge slightly. Remember "not a single sale lost to Linux?" I imagine that extends to Macs, also.
PS
Despite the excruciatingly fan-boi-ish tone of the above, I don't actually own any Apple products.
PPS
Oh, and Steve, if you're reading - can you let me know when my Powerbook ships? kthx
It never ceases to amaze me how, despite its vast wealth, Microsoft somehow manages to hire the absolute worst PR department in the world. Whether they are threatening to sue penniless Biochem students who have broken none of their laws or EULAs, flagrantly inventing people and their pro-microsoft testimonials, or making thinly veiled threats to whole countries about what will happen if they switch to Linux, their cack-handedness and lack of any kind of sophistication, subtlety or sensitivity simple boggles the mind.
Having said that, per your original point - the PR nightmares that stem from being caught astro-turfing are worse than if you publicly announce that that is what you are doing in advance. It's still a really dumb idea, though. Oh well.
there's an open source PDFCreator for Windows that has a printer driver to print to PDF just like Acrobat Distiller
Better, the LaTeX suite allows you to create.PDFs directly (with hyperlinks and everything), as does OO.o, although the latter only supports the creation of hyperlinks in V2.0, or in earlier versions with a third-party (GPL, I think) plug-in.
I've heard from numerous sources that the memory leaks (there's not just one, apparently) have been greatly ameliorated (if not outright fixed) in the developmental versions, and that we'll be seeing these in the 1.1 release.
The difference is though that the other browsers (read: IE, as Konqueror (and hence Safari?), Opera, etc) already or will soon implement it (although I've heard rumblings that even IE7 will implement SVG) and any others are also entirely free to do so, as SVG is open and unpatented. Also, I'm guessing most browsers that do not support SVG would simply ignore it, if the site is designed with some intelligence. So in this particular instance, I don't think there are any flies in the Chardonnay;)
I have to say that much as I really dislike MS as a company (although some of their employees seem quite cool;)), they've recently done very impressive work with security, especially with the advent of SP2. It's extremely hard to retro-fit security onto an old code-base that was not really designed with security in mind but they seem to have really pulled their socks up quite nicely, so I tip my hat to them:)
Not even remotely interesting, since most of those vulnerabilities were found by Firefox devs and hired auditing firms, rather than by seeing exploits in the wild. And how does "being a target" suddenly create more vulnerabilities? A vulnerability in a piece of software is either there or not, irrespective of how many people use it.
Having said that, I am of the opinion that as the number of people using Firefox increases, so will the number of exploits, but I can't imagine it ever reaching IE proportions; you pretty much have to design in that level of insecurity;)
It's bad that a quality piece of open source software is getting the recognition it deserves, because it will fall even faster than IE to surreptitious purveyors of spyware and virii taking advantage of the source to discover new ways to subvert our web browsers without our knowledge.
Good - I say "bring it". Because whereas spyware developers have to spend *weeks* poring over the massive, already heavily-audited code-base looking for exploits, and then days to weeks tailoring a piece of code to exploit it and distributing the malicious code, the Firefox developers who actually have intimate knowledge of how Firefox works will probably have a fix within hours. With the upcoming trouble-free patching in Firefox 1.1, a fix will probably be distributed within days of an exploit hitting. And so the arms-race continues, but the Firefox team (who are more dedicated to their product than Microsoft were to IE) will always have the upper hand as the majority of vulnerabilites are far easier to patch than they are to craft and distribute an exploit for.
I actually had to Google to figure out what that was. Good catch. Although, without a proper filesystem to support it, Beagle may fall short just like many other indexing engines.
I was going to provide links for each one, but I couldn't even find Beagle's homepage - apologies for that:)
MPlayer is:
1. Not legal
2. Not bundled
3. Not fully compatible
4. A pain in the posterior to use
5. Not a media management solutio
Good points, all (although I don't find it hard to use at all - have you been using it without a proper front-end, like gmplayer?). I guess I'm still not sure what a media management solution entails (as the only media I have on my computer tends to be pr0n;) Do you mean something like, I don't know, ITunes? I gather that amaroK is of this nature, and appears to be very polished, featureful and popular.
XGL is a X Server plugin, not a desktop environment... Mac OS X and Looking Glass, however, show that all that GL power can be turned to good rather than evil
Ah, I'm afraid I don't know what this means. I'll look up Looking Glass when I have the chance. Note that XGL is intended solely as an enabler for fancy hardware-acclerated effects; the effects themselves (e.g. Expose-alikes) will come later (although you might want to check out skippy-xd right now, and KDE/XFCE/GNOME's Compositors:)).
When you run CD/DVD burns on the Mac, they Just Work(TM). Microsoft is trying to replicate that. Linux is still, "Ok, dude. First figure out your CD drive. Then choose the command line programs that support your drive. Then create an ISO yourself, and insert a disk in the drive. Don't forget to unmount it before you eject, man! Now press 'burn' and pray to the penguin wanna-be-gods that it works the first time. If it doesn't, you'll need some righteous incantations to get it working!"
Hmmm...I have to say I have never, ever come across anything like this (over 2 CD-writers and 1 DVD writer) with recent distros - K3B has always detected and utilised them perfectly (all within the GUI) and they literally have Just Worked(TM) out of the box. In KDE, a request to Eject automatically triggers an unmount. One area that until very recently was an utter pain in the arse is that of unmounting CDs (or USB pens) when you had a file manager open and showing their contents (and something like famd running); a request to unmount (and by extension, Eject) would return a supremely unhelpful "Device or Resource is Busy!". I'm happy to report though that having tried this under Kubuntu (which has ditched famd in favour of the much-improved gamin), tearing out a CD or USB pen without unmounting behaved in exactly the way I would want (removal of the icons from the desktop; blanking of the folders showing the CD/ Pen contents). Proper unmounting before removal also worked fine. I was very pleased, as this has been a long-standing headache for me:)
I really think your overestimating people there. A few of my friends are still saying "Can't wait for Longhorn". I'm know that they'll be queueing up outside the shop for it.
I anticipated your response, which is why I originally included this proviso:
Indeed - especially when you consider that some of the features that are actually worth getting vaguely excited about (except for Mac users like you, of course;)) - i.e. WinFS and the 3D accelaration-type stuff (Aero?) are apparently going to be backported to XP. I think the upshot is that anyone with half a brain is going to stay on XP, and the only way that Longhorn will proliferate is by being included by default on new machines.
Thanks for the response:) I've actually tried it with gamin (the new famd replacement which uses inotify) under Kubuntu, and it still didn't work:/ Once I added my patch, though, all was dandy - changes to files were echoed automatically in all relevant konqueror windows. And - *shock! horror!* I could insert my pen drive, open it up in Konqeror and either yank the pen out or do the "Safely Remove Hardware" thing and the folder view went to empty with none of this crappy "Device is busy!" stuff anymore. Same with CDs. I was very impressed - it's about time this kind of thing got fixed, as it's been a real headache. Bravo, all those who helped to make this work!
I guess I'll post a brand new bug report as my appendment to an existing one has gone completely unnoticed - the bug has surfaced on two distros now, so I'm fairly sure it is a proper bug, and now that the famd & removeable-storage mount-point fuckery is hopefully behind us for ever, it would be a shame if Konqueror didn't capitalise on it.
IBM's rebuttal does a decent job of allaying some of the fears - for example, it states that it will not prevent you from running any OS & programs you wish to on your own computer (which, for the record, I believe - witness the Trusted Gentoo project and e.g. this this link). They state that their approach to Trusted Computing is not particularly well-suited to DRM, and on the face of it, I agree - there seems to be little attempt at restricting the user of a computer with the TPM from doing what they want. However, in my opinion, as a base for an utterly crippling DRM regime, distributors simply could not ask for a better setup, as I'll argue a little later.
So to re-cap, it seems that if you are running Trusted hardware, there are no restrictions on what you can do on your computer in isolation; you can install Linux, run any number of Open Source apps, etc. But the keyword here is in isolation, and it is here that the dangers of Trusted Computing are revealed. For you see, Trusted Computing enables the usage of remote attestation wherein a server may request a hash of all software currently running on your computer. This hash is, for all intents and purposes, unforgeable, and if you disable your TPM (as IBM stress that you can, and again for the record, I see no reason to disbelieve them), no hash will be sent. The server may then assess this hash of software (or note that no hash has been provided, in which case it may well treat your computer as Untrusted) and decide, based on what software you are running, to simply not serve you with whatever material you requested - for example, it may decide that it will not deliver MP3's to your computer unless it knows for a fact that the receiving application is one that is known to encrypt the content as soon as it is received (so that e.g. it simply cannot be viewed while not running in Trusted mode) and which will take every step to ensure that once received, the unencrypted content never leaves your machine (e.g. by being written to CD, e-mailed , etc.). As you can imagine, the above scenario is not at all far-fetched as the **AA/ other media distributors are positively *creaming* themselves at the thought of stamping out casual file-sharing or even making backups for your own use in some of your other devices.
So we are left with the situation where someone who does not use Trusted hardware (and is thus unable to respond to attestation requests) or those who do run Trusted hardware but whose software fingerprint is not deemed acceptable by the server will simply not be granted access to certain material, rendering such people at a big disadvantage. And it's no good buying hardware free from Trust chips from China or such places on the "black market"; this offers no advantage at all as Trusted hardware, as mentioned, does not stop you using your computer the way you want in isolation; the problem only occurs when you try to interact with other computers.
So far, this sounds unpleasant but not too bad (although I would urge you to read Anderson's linked essay for some more imaginative and serious abuses), but if we allow ourselves to follow the slippery-slope, we end up at the state where ISPs will not allow your computer to access the internet at all (for surfing, e-mailing, anything) unless you are running Trusted hardware and software. Obviously, the social, political and legal barriers to this occurence are non-trivial, but we've all seen ridiculous Acts qu
From this day forth, I proclaim the French to be the bravest, politest and sweetest-smelling of all Nations! Let's hope this extends to the next generation of media, also.
It's always uplifting to see a politician with a keen, sharp mind and a sense of honesty and integrity - in a world where politicians are frequently stupid (incapable of participating in a debate without resorting to pure rhetoric and soundbites), dishonest, and looking only to further their careers, it is a breath of fresh air. This letter is one of my favourite examples of the former.
It's always struck me that Mandrake was kind of the "black sheep" of RPM-based distros; that is, whenever you go to a software download site, you almost always see your SUSE and Fedora, but very rarely your Mandrake, and even then, it's often fairy late to the game.
The PLF is indeed very good, but I've had problems with thacs before. It just seems that even when you add a bunch of third-party repositories, everything but the very major packages were a few versions behind. I've now switched to Gentoo, and the situation is much improved. It's a shame, as Mandrake is in all other respects (installer, hardware detection, out-of-the-box functionality, etc) a very nice distro.
...I feel that as long as your repositories are up to date and reasonably extensive (as is the case with, say, Gentoo, Ubunutu, SUSE(?), but not Mandrake), installation of software under Linux is way better than under Windows. Seriously, it is completely awesome to just be able to bring up a GUI tool with neatly categorised software, check off 100 pieces of software, walk away and find them all installed without having had to do a single "Where shall I install this? Agree to this EULA! etc".
I was once playing UT04, and all of a sudden the hard-drive went crazy, the frame-rate dropped and I rolled my eyes - obviously Linux was misbehaving again. It subsided after a minute or so (I kept on kicking ass the whole time, by the way, as I am hardcore:)) and a while later I quit. I then had a brainwave, and checked through the "Office" section of the K-menu - sure enough, OO.o was there. Turns out, I'd done an urpmi openoffice a while before playing UT, left it downloading, forgot about it completely, and the hard-drive thrashing while I played was the download completing and the installation taking place. I'd installed an entire fucking Office Suite without even lifting a finger. Cool stuff:)
Of course, if you want something that is not in your repository, then prepare for the worst pain ever or go without. It would be nice if some measure existed to ease the burden on packagers, as it seems that keeping them up to date is a tedious and thankless task.
Slashdot Mirror
As always, I end with my favourite link that I like to post in situations such as these. If you are cheered by the spectacle of a politician thoroughly demolishing Microsoft FUD, read on!
http://www.opensource.org/docs/peru_and_ms.php
HP are apparently working on a fork of Ubuntu (which will be merged back into the mainline branch) which supports absolutely 100% (from suspend/ resume/ hibernate to modems to 3D acceleration) of the hardware on some of their laptops, which I find heartening.
PS
Despite the excruciatingly fan-boi-ish tone of the above, I don't actually own any Apple products.
PPS
Oh, and Steve, if you're reading - can you let me know when my Powerbook ships? kthx
Having said that, per your original point - the PR nightmares that stem from being caught astro-turfing are worse than if you publicly announce that that is what you are doing in advance. It's still a really dumb idea, though. Oh well.
I've heard from numerous sources that the memory leaks (there's not just one, apparently) have been greatly ameliorated (if not outright fixed) in the developmental versions, and that we'll be seeing these in the 1.1 release.
The difference is though that the other browsers (read: IE, as Konqueror (and hence Safari?), Opera, etc) already or will soon implement it (although I've heard rumblings that even IE7 will implement SVG) and any others are also entirely free to do so, as SVG is open and unpatented. Also, I'm guessing most browsers that do not support SVG would simply ignore it, if the site is designed with some intelligence. So in this particular instance, I don't think there are any flies in the Chardonnay ;)
I don't see this as a fork, particularly, as it is intended solely to aid the development process e.g. not to compete with (K)Ubuntu.
I have to say that much as I really dislike MS as a company (although some of their employees seem quite cool ;)), they've recently done very impressive work with security, especially with the advent of SP2. It's extremely hard to retro-fit security onto an old code-base that was not really designed with security in mind but they seem to have really pulled their socks up quite nicely, so I tip my hat to them :)
Having said that, I am of the opinion that as the number of people using Firefox increases, so will the number of exploits, but I can't imagine it ever reaching IE proportions; you pretty much have to design in that level of insecurity ;)
I believe it would mend the breach between canines and felines, and lead them to co-habit.
Good points, all (although I don't find it hard to use at all - have you been using it without a proper front-end, like gmplayer?). I guess I'm still not sure what a media management solution entails (as the only media I have on my computer tends to be pr0n ;) Do you mean something like, I don't know, ITunes? I gather that amaroK is of this nature, and appears to be very polished, featureful and popular.
Ah, I'm afraid I don't know what this means. I'll look up Looking Glass when I have the chance. Note that XGL is intended solely as an enabler for fancy hardware-acclerated effects; the effects themselves (e.g. Expose-alikes) will come later (although you might want to check out skippy-xd right now, and KDE/XFCE/GNOME's CompositorsIndeed - especially when you consider that some of the features that are actually worth getting vaguely excited about (except for Mac users like you, of course ;)) - i.e. WinFS and the 3D accelaration-type stuff (Aero?) are apparently going to be backported to XP. I think the upshot is that anyone with half a brain is going to stay on XP, and the only way that Longhorn will proliferate is by being included by default on new machines.
I guess I'll post a brand new bug report as my appendment to an existing one has gone completely unnoticed - the bug has surfaced on two distros now, so I'm fairly sure it is a proper bug, and now that the famd & removeable-storage mount-point fuckery is hopefully behind us for ever, it would be a shame if Konqueror didn't capitalise on it.
Ross Anderson's Critique
IBM's Rebuttal
Trusted Gentoo
IBM's rebuttal does a decent job of allaying some of the fears - for example, it states that it will not prevent you from running any OS & programs you wish to on your own computer (which, for the record, I believe - witness the Trusted Gentoo project and e.g. this this link). They state that their approach to Trusted Computing is not particularly well-suited to DRM, and on the face of it, I agree - there seems to be little attempt at restricting the user of a computer with the TPM from doing what they want. However, in my opinion, as a base for an utterly crippling DRM regime, distributors simply could not ask for a better setup, as I'll argue a little later.
So to re-cap, it seems that if you are running Trusted hardware, there are no restrictions on what you can do on your computer in isolation; you can install Linux, run any number of Open Source apps, etc. But the keyword here is in isolation, and it is here that the dangers of Trusted Computing are revealed. For you see, Trusted Computing enables the usage of remote attestation wherein a server may request a hash of all software currently running on your computer. This hash is, for all intents and purposes, unforgeable, and if you disable your TPM (as IBM stress that you can, and again for the record, I see no reason to disbelieve them), no hash will be sent. The server may then assess this hash of software (or note that no hash has been provided, in which case it may well treat your computer as Untrusted) and decide, based on what software you are running, to simply not serve you with whatever material you requested - for example, it may decide that it will not deliver MP3's to your computer unless it knows for a fact that the receiving application is one that is known to encrypt the content as soon as it is received (so that e.g. it simply cannot be viewed while not running in Trusted mode) and which will take every step to ensure that once received, the unencrypted content never leaves your machine (e.g. by being written to CD, e-mailed , etc.). As you can imagine, the above scenario is not at all far-fetched as the **AA/ other media distributors are positively *creaming* themselves at the thought of stamping out casual file-sharing or even making backups for your own use in some of your other devices.
So we are left with the situation where someone who does not use Trusted hardware (and is thus unable to respond to attestation requests) or those who do run Trusted hardware but whose software fingerprint is not deemed acceptable by the server will simply not be granted access to certain material, rendering such people at a big disadvantage. And it's no good buying hardware free from Trust chips from China or such places on the "black market"; this offers no advantage at all as Trusted hardware, as mentioned, does not stop you using your computer the way you want in isolation; the problem only occurs when you try to interact with other computers.
So far, this sounds unpleasant but not too bad (although I would urge you to read Anderson's linked essay for some more imaginative and serious abuses), but if we allow ourselves to follow the slippery-slope, we end up at the state where ISPs will not allow your computer to access the internet at all (for surfing, e-mailing, anything) unless you are running Trusted hardware and software. Obviously, the social, political and legal barriers to this occurence are non-trivial, but we've all seen ridiculous Acts qu
From this day forth, I proclaim the French to be the bravest, politest and sweetest-smelling of all Nations! Let's hope this extends to the next generation of media, also.
(ducks)
It's always uplifting to see a politician with a keen, sharp mind and a sense of honesty and integrity - in a world where politicians are frequently stupid (incapable of participating in a debate without resorting to pure rhetoric and soundbites), dishonest, and looking only to further their careers, it is a breath of fresh air. This letter is one of my favourite examples of the former.
My apologies - truth is, I've never used Debian or Ubuntu, so I was just going by hearsay :)
The PLF is indeed very good, but I've had problems with thacs before. It just seems that even when you add a bunch of third-party repositories, everything but the very major packages were a few versions behind. I've now switched to Gentoo, and the situation is much improved. It's a shame, as Mandrake is in all other respects (installer, hardware detection, out-of-the-box functionality, etc) a very nice distro.
I was once playing UT04, and all of a sudden the hard-drive went crazy, the frame-rate dropped and I rolled my eyes - obviously Linux was misbehaving again. It subsided after a minute or so (I kept on kicking ass the whole time, by the way, as I am hardcore :)) and a while later I quit. I then had a brainwave, and checked through the "Office" section of the K-menu - sure enough, OO.o was there. Turns out, I'd done an urpmi openoffice a while before playing UT, left it downloading, forgot about it completely, and the hard-drive thrashing while I played was the download completing and the installation taking place. I'd installed an entire fucking Office Suite without even lifting a finger. Cool stuff :)
Of course, if you want something that is not in your repository, then prepare for the worst pain ever or go without. It would be nice if some measure existed to ease the burden on packagers, as it seems that keeping them up to date is a tedious and thankless task.