Re:How about doing something actually useful ?
on
Next Generation X11
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· Score: 1
I'm sure they are working on this also. Unfortunately, XFree was stagnant for such a long time that there is a lot of catching up to do. I'm quite happy to see this kind of "blue sky" research as long as it is happening alongside stuff that will be immediately useful. Very happy, actually, as it all looks rather sexy:)
I thought that they had pretty much junked what would have been good search. I was looking forward to WinFS, hoping it to be an improvement over NTFS
From one I understand, WinFS is something of a misnomer, as it is not actually a file system at all. It's more or less just a database sitting on top of NTFS.
but has this affected integration with M$ and Open source programs
Yes. Massively. I dread to think how many man-hours have gone to waste experimenting with MS's document "formats" (according to some, a straight memory dump of Word while it was running!) in an attempt to figure out how it works - time that could have been spent on adding useful features to OO.o. And import/ export is still problematic at best, and flat-out disastrous at worst.
Indeed - it's "open" in exactly the same way that an unadvertised document in the bottom draw of a filing cabinet in an abandoned toilet in the basement of the local council with a sign attached saying "Beware of the Leopard" is.
A bit off topic, but also, why the heck won't MS Office import OO.org.swx files?
It is not is Microsoft's best interest to be interoperable with an open-source competitor - if it could import and export to.swx flawlessly (pretty easy, since not only is the standard open, there's even a reference implementation!) a lot of headaches in switching to OO.o would disappear. Plus, it would lend OO.o credence.
Is there any way of installing extensions from the command line? If so, just pop your extensions (.xpi's), userprefs.js and a few other odds and ends together with a batch script that just installs them one-by-one and take this with you whenever you do an install.
Or just create a blank profile with no sensitive history or signon data, install your extensions on it, arrange all your settings and just carry this profile around with you.
It looks like gplflash (http://gplflash.sourceforge.net/) is just, just starting to pick up a little bit (it now has the support of the FSF) so hopefully we won't be too dependent on Macromedia anymore. Honestly, it's a pretty lame state of affairs where pretty much every aspect of Linx, from Kernel to Desktop to Apps, now runs more-or-less perfectly on 64-bit and the only things holding it up are the (proprietary, of course) 64-bit versions of Flash and Java.
Unfortunately, media formats are things that tend to be patented to the hilt, so I'm guessing Novell have to tread very carefully with what formats they can support out of the box. It's worth noting that in other distros (e.g. Mandrake via the PLF, and Gentoo; probably others, too), getting mplayer to play damn near every format in existence is pretty much effortless.
OO.o at least is officially on 1.1.14; 2.0 is merely a beta. Gimp 2.2 is not that old, but yes, I'd expect 2.4, at least. I've immensely surprised about Firefox, though - very strange indeed, especially as nearly all of the updates since 1.0 have been security based, rather than adding new and unstable features.
Reminds me of Ballmer's thinly-veiled (if not flat-out blatant) threat made to China recently, except in that particular instance, it probably did more to put China off Microsoft and onto Linux:) God bless your ham-fisted lack of tact, Mr Ballmer!:)
This is very common, and happens on both Windows and Firefox. It's a very well known and long standing bug (sorry, I don't have bugtraq numbers, but there are many of them). Apparently, it has recently been fixed in the development version (or at least, greatly alleviated), but the fixes won't be part of a "proper" release until Firefox 1.1.
In the meantime, just do what I do - install SessionSaver, and close Firefox down and re-open when memory consumption gets too large.
a) Someone has made a solution that is better than anything you have, and you are trying to find out what makes it tick so you can cheat and steal it.
b) Someone has made a solution that is pretty good, but which you have something just as good as, and you seek only interoperability*
It strikes me from what I've read that this whole BitKeeper fiasco is an example of the former i.e. that the open-source community do not have anything as capable as BitKeeper is, and this kind of reverse-engineering is, as Larry puts it, "riding my coat-tails", and is something I don't really like to see happen, nor would I sleep easily at night if I did.
Samba, on the other hand (see extensive footnote below!) is different - I gather that very capable networking systems have already been created (although I could well be wrong about this - I know very little about networking) and so the open-source community has already proven that it has the brainpower required to produce something "as good as" Samba, and so is not cheating. If this is true, then I would not lose a wink of sleep from reverse-engineering Samba.
Another example I guess would be in video codecs - I see nothing wrong with reverse-engineering WMV so that it could be played in mplayer, as the open-source community already has xvid, which is at least almost as good as WMV (perhaps even better; I do not know).
* There is no conflict between "being as good as" and "not being interoperable with" i.g. "not being able to do the same thing as, in the same way". As an example, say I created a networking protocol that enabled one to share files, printers etc easily and transparently - i.e. does everything that Samba can do. However, I know nothing about the way that Samba works, so although on a network of computers running only clients and servers for my protocol, everything works just as well as it would in an all-Samba environment, put any of my servers and clients in a Samba environment and they will not work - my protocol, from the point of view of observed function, is just as good and capable as Samba, it's just they speak different languages.
Re:The sad part is...
on
Longhorn Preview
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Wish I had mod points; you hit the nail right on the head, there. I know people - "IT professionals" who are well-paid - who are utterly convinced that Microsoft are the source of every innovation the computing world has seen, and have their best interests at heart, little knowing of the DRM-infested nightmare Microsoft would like to ensnare them in. It's astonishing, disheartening, and apparently uncurable - people don't seem to even want to be convinced otherwise. These are the same people who appear to be thrilled to bits at every setback the Free Software movement suffers and will gloat over it endlessly, even though the Free Software pioneers are more likely to want what's best for them than Microsoft. A real shame.
They're cached, so it's not really an issue. I just wandered into a folder with 40.pdfs in Konqueror, and it thumbnailed about 3 per second (Athlon 2800, here). The whole time, it was fully responsive and I could navigate in and out with ease. Now they're all done, I can navigate back in and the thumbnails are shown instantly.
Of course, rousing the colossal beast that is OpenOffice each time you want to thumbnail a Word doc might be another story;)
Every time we see an article about some brand-new vulnerability in some open-source apps, we always hear the same chorus of "open-source is only more secure because it's less popular! Once it's as popular as Windows, you'll be in the same spyware-ridden mess!" and then we always hear the counter-chorus of "no, open-source software is designed from the ground up to be more secure, it'll never happen!". I've always agreed with the latter, but lately I've had second thoughts.
For example, there was a priviledge escalation vulnerability in pretty much all kernel versions around Christmas time. I was running Mandrake at the time, and counted how long it would take to get a fix. I think it finally appeared in the automated update section a month later in the form of a package of kernel source code - no installer, nothing. I tried compiling and installing it, but it failed to boot so catastrophically that I just gave up and switched distros (I'd been planning to ditch Mandrake for a while now). The point is, even with Windows with its "Click-Click and you're done!" security updates, few people bother to update. How are they going to respond when they have to re-compile their fucking kernel (presumably tracking down and copying across their old kernel first)? Answer: they're not, and so any exploit like the one in TFA will leave you rooted.
One area where Linux is perhaps a little more safe stems from the marked heterogenity of Linux environments - people are always whinging about how hard it is to install legitimate software (I've never really had a problem myself, for the record, and consider the LinuxWay superior to that of Windows, assuming a nice, up-to-date and complete repository) but the fact is that a keylogger can run with very few dependencies, and even then any libraries it needs can be compiled in, so we can scratch this one, too.
For all the accusations of FUD this article will receive, I can't help but worry about the future of Firefox & Linux et al. What would be nice is if people used "safer" languages like Python etc - heck, even using C++ with a template library that bounds-checked every access would be an improvement, and easily worth the minor performance hit. Thoughts?
That's actually a very good point, and one I had not considered (fuck knows why you're -1, overated!). I wonder if the WINE libs would be of use here for Windows developers wishing to port to Linux? Is this very standardised and up to the task of providing a rich and dependable infrastructure for most apps, do you think?
Way back last year, I installed UT04 on my Mandrake 10 (lol) Linux machine (finding the installer hidden away on the first CD was an unexpected delight; finding that it was just as slick as the Windows installer, even more so). I installed it on its own partition, as was the style at the time.
Flash forward to now: I have worked my way through the following distros, by doing a full wipe-and-reinstall each time:
Mandrake 10 (as mentioned);
Mandrake 10.1;
Gentoo(lol)
Each time, as soon as the nVidia binary driver was installed, UT04 would start and run without a single tweak being made to the UT04 install.
The lesson to learn is this: although the majority of open-source Linux software is not self-contained (and this is by conscious design) and has dependencies that need to be tracked-down and installed first, there is no reason at all why a company can't just package up everything it needs in one big self-contained lump, eliminating the need for dependencies or the need to run on a specific distro entirely. As for the comment that you need to recompile for different hardware: I have no idea what you're talking about. Clearly, if you have a x86 app, it will need to be re-compiled to run at full speed on a PPC system - a difficulty not encountered in the Windows world for the sole reason that Windows is only capable of running on x86, and similary for MacOSX.
I suspect I've just been feeding a troll, but oh well - who cares?:)
...grateful that some companies are porting their apps to run on Linux, why-oh-why is it always the ones for which perfectly acceptable open-source alternatives already exist e.g. Acroread (KPDF, GPDF, XPDF) and Nero (K3B)? When are we going to see photoshop and other specialised developmental tools being ported? Again, I don't want to seem ungrateful, but this is just such a shame, and when Nero see and report pretty much zero sales from the Linux community (because of the existence of free, Free and good "K3B"), what kind of message will this send to the companies looking to port apps for which there is no existing Linux equivalent?
I've had shitty luck with noatun. mplayer, loaded up with all codecs (USE="win32codec quicktime theora arts dvd real xvid xv oggvorbis" emerge mplayer should do it - sorry, I may have missed a few USE options) works nicely for me, and I know there is a way of getting it to start at a pre-defined location and size (but can't remember off the top of my head). I'm afraid I have no idea about the audio/ video syncing - try it out with mplayer and see if it helps - if not, you can actually alter the time-difference while a video is playing with mplayer. I've always found Linux to be less responsive than Windows myself, so I'm afraid I can't help you there, either - basically, X has stagnated for so long that they now have a lot of catching up to do. Anyway, I wish you the best of luck in your quest to escape from Windows:)
i could make the argument that for the average computer user, XP starter is a heck of a lot better than any linux distro
A pre-installed copy of Windows scores over a pre-installed copy of Linux in approximately one area: games. Also, I've never seen a copy of Windows come with the voluminous amount of useful software you get with a Linux distro.
and if XPS is something MS is taking a loss on, it's down right charitable of them to try and target lower income situations (and making the higher income portions of the market place pay for it)
Charitable my arse. As always, what you have to consider is that Microsoft cares far more for mindshare and discrediting alternative OS's (and keeping them from getting a foothold, even if it involves cutting into a top executive's holiday-time) than they do about money. Them simply giving out 10000 copies of Windows costs them about the cost of 10000 CDs - much less if they are pre-installing it (for which they actually collect royalties, of course). The only additional cost they have is in crippling their perfectly (well, that's debatable;)) functional OS so they can deign to sell it to less affluent people. Bill Gates the individual is immensely charitable; Microsoft the company is an unethical entity who want every desktop on the planet locked in to their product by almost any means necessary.
naturally i'm just a bit too cynical to buy that completely
Then there is hope for you yet;)
but it probably bears consideration. set aside any fanboy hatred of MS for a moment, and consider what will get people in developing countries on the computer/internet wave with the least effort... XP starter edition, or gentoo ?
An entirely false comparison. Firstly, if the OSs come pre-installed, the answer of course is neither - both should have been configured to use all the hardware correctly and take the user to a desktop with a shortcut to the webbrowser. Also, you obviously haven't used (K)Ubuntu recently!;)
Sorry to self-reply, but I simply had to post this link. It's been mentioned on slashdot several times, I'm sure, but it is a perfect example of how a goverment should respond to any offers of charity or special deals from Microsoft:
...Gentlemen, with top hat and cane (maybe a monocle, too! Who knows?) is wandering a long, finishing off some tasty, expensive delicacy when he happens across a poor beggar. In a fit of charity, he offers the beggar the remains of this appetizing dish for the small sum of $10.
"But sir," exclaims the beggar, "I am but a poor beggar, and have only the single dollar I've scraped together over the course of the day."
The Gentlemen smiles benignly, drops the treat to the ground, grinds it under his heel and takes a big steaming dump on it.
"There, my wretched young friend", he intones, in what he thinks is a warm, kindly voice, "I'm sure it's worth only a dollar now!".
And at this point my shitty allegory ends lamely with some other chap simply giving the beggar a good, wholesome meal for free, or something.
----
You know what I think? Brazil should take Microsofts' shitty, insulting, purposely crippled "gift" and tell them to fuck off.
PS
For the slower amongst you, Microsoft was the rich gentleman, by the way;)
Yeah, I seem to recall that in Mandrake 10.1 (the latest proper release), the latest version of gaim was 0.78, or something, and KDE was still on 3.2.3. There are third-party repositories with more up-to-date stuff, however, but the fact remains that Mandrake is the black sheep of RPM-based distros, and is almost always last on the list when apps are packaged. All it really has going for it is a top-notch installer, hardware detection, and an inital configuration that doesn't need too much fiddling to get into an acceptable state (e.g. automounting of devices comes as standard) - things that I gather are matched, or at least soon will be, by e.g. Ubuntu. Keeping a Mandrake install up-to-date is a real chore, and is the reason I just switched to Gentoo (laugh all you want!:))
I'm a little more optimistic; it seems that there is at least some trend for hardware manufacturers (of e.g. Digital Cameras; TV Cards) to simply license and re-package older chips for which there is at least some Linux driver support. This will never happen with graphics cards, however, and unless that open-spec graphics card actually gets made (the one that was featured on slashdot last year; can't remember the name or link, sorry!), we'll probably always be reliant on the manufacturers to produce binary drivers.
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I'm sure they are working on this also. Unfortunately, XFree was stagnant for such a long time that there is a lot of catching up to do. I'm quite happy to see this kind of "blue sky" research as long as it is happening alongside stuff that will be immediately useful. Very happy, actually, as it all looks rather sexy :)
Indeed - it's "open" in exactly the same way that an unadvertised document in the bottom draw of a filing cabinet in an abandoned toilet in the basement of the local council with a sign attached saying "Beware of the Leopard" is.
Or just create a blank profile with no sensitive history or signon data, install your extensions on it, arrange all your settings and just carry this profile around with you.
http://codebetter.com/blogs/darrell.norton/archive /2004/09/29/27160.aspx
It looks like gplflash (http://gplflash.sourceforge.net/) is just, just starting to pick up a little bit (it now has the support of the FSF) so hopefully we won't be too dependent on Macromedia anymore. Honestly, it's a pretty lame state of affairs where pretty much every aspect of Linx, from Kernel to Desktop to Apps, now runs more-or-less perfectly on 64-bit and the only things holding it up are the (proprietary, of course) 64-bit versions of Flash and Java.
Unfortunately, media formats are things that tend to be patented to the hilt, so I'm guessing Novell have to tread very carefully with what formats they can support out of the box. It's worth noting that in other distros (e.g. Mandrake via the PLF, and Gentoo; probably others, too), getting mplayer to play damn near every format in existence is pretty much effortless.
OO.o at least is officially on 1.1.14; 2.0 is merely a beta. Gimp 2.2 is not that old, but yes, I'd expect 2.4, at least. I've immensely surprised about Firefox, though - very strange indeed, especially as nearly all of the updates since 1.0 have been security based, rather than adding new and unstable features.
Reminds me of Ballmer's thinly-veiled (if not flat-out blatant) threat made to China recently, except in that particular instance, it probably did more to put China off Microsoft and onto Linux :) God bless your ham-fisted lack of tact, Mr Ballmer! :)
In the meantime, just do what I do - install SessionSaver, and close Firefox down and re-open when memory consumption gets too large.
a) Someone has made a solution that is better than anything you have, and you are trying to find out what makes it tick so you can cheat and steal it.
b) Someone has made a solution that is pretty good, but which you have something just as good as, and you seek only interoperability*
It strikes me from what I've read that this whole BitKeeper fiasco is an example of the former i.e. that the open-source community do not have anything as capable as BitKeeper is, and this kind of reverse-engineering is, as Larry puts it, "riding my coat-tails", and is something I don't really like to see happen, nor would I sleep easily at night if I did. Samba, on the other hand (see extensive footnote below!) is different - I gather that very capable networking systems have already been created (although I could well be wrong about this - I know very little about networking) and so the open-source community has already proven that it has the brainpower required to produce something "as good as" Samba, and so is not cheating. If this is true, then I would not lose a wink of sleep from reverse-engineering Samba.
Another example I guess would be in video codecs - I see nothing wrong with reverse-engineering WMV so that it could be played in mplayer, as the open-source community already has xvid, which is at least almost as good as WMV (perhaps even better; I do not know).
* There is no conflict between "being as good as" and "not being interoperable with" i.g. "not being able to do the same thing as, in the same way". As an example, say I created a networking protocol that enabled one to share files, printers etc easily and transparently - i.e. does everything that Samba can do. However, I know nothing about the way that Samba works, so although on a network of computers running only clients and servers for my protocol, everything works just as well as it would in an all-Samba environment, put any of my servers and clients in a Samba environment and they will not work - my protocol, from the point of view of observed function, is just as good and capable as Samba, it's just they speak different languages.
Wish I had mod points; you hit the nail right on the head, there. I know people - "IT professionals" who are well-paid - who are utterly convinced that Microsoft are the source of every innovation the computing world has seen, and have their best interests at heart, little knowing of the DRM-infested nightmare Microsoft would like to ensnare them in. It's astonishing, disheartening, and apparently uncurable - people don't seem to even want to be convinced otherwise. These are the same people who appear to be thrilled to bits at every setback the Free Software movement suffers and will gloat over it endlessly, even though the Free Software pioneers are more likely to want what's best for them than Microsoft. A real shame.
Of course, rousing the colossal beast that is OpenOffice each time you want to thumbnail a Word doc might be another story ;)
For example, there was a priviledge escalation vulnerability in pretty much all kernel versions around Christmas time. I was running Mandrake at the time, and counted how long it would take to get a fix. I think it finally appeared in the automated update section a month later in the form of a package of kernel source code - no installer, nothing. I tried compiling and installing it, but it failed to boot so catastrophically that I just gave up and switched distros (I'd been planning to ditch Mandrake for a while now). The point is, even with Windows with its "Click-Click and you're done!" security updates, few people bother to update. How are they going to respond when they have to re-compile their fucking kernel (presumably tracking down and copying across their old kernel first)? Answer: they're not, and so any exploit like the one in TFA will leave you rooted.
One area where Linux is perhaps a little more safe stems from the marked heterogenity of Linux environments - people are always whinging about how hard it is to install legitimate software (I've never really had a problem myself, for the record, and consider the LinuxWay superior to that of Windows, assuming a nice, up-to-date and complete repository) but the fact is that a keylogger can run with very few dependencies, and even then any libraries it needs can be compiled in, so we can scratch this one, too.
For all the accusations of FUD this article will receive, I can't help but worry about the future of Firefox & Linux et al. What would be nice is if people used "safer" languages like Python etc - heck, even using C++ with a template library that bounds-checked every access would be an improvement, and easily worth the minor performance hit. Thoughts?
That's actually a very good point, and one I had not considered (fuck knows why you're -1, overated!). I wonder if the WINE libs would be of use here for Windows developers wishing to port to Linux? Is this very standardised and up to the task of providing a rich and dependable infrastructure for most apps, do you think?
Flash forward to now: I have worked my way through the following distros, by doing a full wipe-and-reinstall each time:
Mandrake 10 (as mentioned);
Mandrake 10.1;
Gentoo(lol)
Each time, as soon as the nVidia binary driver was installed, UT04 would start and run without a single tweak being made to the UT04 install.
The lesson to learn is this: although the majority of open-source Linux software is not self-contained (and this is by conscious design) and has dependencies that need to be tracked-down and installed first, there is no reason at all why a company can't just package up everything it needs in one big self-contained lump, eliminating the need for dependencies or the need to run on a specific distro entirely. As for the comment that you need to recompile for different hardware: I have no idea what you're talking about. Clearly, if you have a x86 app, it will need to be re-compiled to run at full speed on a PPC system - a difficulty not encountered in the Windows world for the sole reason that Windows is only capable of running on x86, and similary for MacOSX.
I suspect I've just been feeding a troll, but oh well - who cares? :)
...grateful that some companies are porting their apps to run on Linux, why-oh-why is it always the ones for which perfectly acceptable open-source alternatives already exist e.g. Acroread (KPDF, GPDF, XPDF) and Nero (K3B)? When are we going to see photoshop and other specialised developmental tools being ported? Again, I don't want to seem ungrateful, but this is just such a shame, and when Nero see and report pretty much zero sales from the Linux community (because of the existence of free, Free and good "K3B"), what kind of message will this send to the companies looking to port apps for which there is no existing Linux equivalent?
I've had shitty luck with noatun. mplayer, loaded up with all codecs (USE="win32codec quicktime theora arts dvd real xvid xv oggvorbis" emerge mplayer should do it - sorry, I may have missed a few USE options) works nicely for me, and I know there is a way of getting it to start at a pre-defined location and size (but can't remember off the top of my head). I'm afraid I have no idea about the audio/ video syncing - try it out with mplayer and see if it helps - if not, you can actually alter the time-difference while a video is playing with mplayer. I've always found Linux to be less responsive than Windows myself, so I'm afraid I can't help you there, either - basically, X has stagnated for so long that they now have a lot of catching up to do. Anyway, I wish you the best of luck in your quest to escape from Windows :)
http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2002-05 -06-012-26-OS-SM-LL
"But sir," exclaims the beggar, "I am but a poor beggar, and have only the single dollar I've scraped together over the course of the day."
The Gentlemen smiles benignly, drops the treat to the ground, grinds it under his heel and takes a big steaming dump on it.
"There, my wretched young friend", he intones, in what he thinks is a warm, kindly voice, "I'm sure it's worth only a dollar now!".
And at this point my shitty allegory ends lamely with some other chap simply giving the beggar a good, wholesome meal for free, or something.
----
You know what I think? Brazil should take Microsofts' shitty, insulting, purposely crippled "gift" and tell them to fuck off.
PS
For the slower amongst you, Microsoft was the rich gentleman, by the way ;)
Yeah, I seem to recall that in Mandrake 10.1 (the latest proper release), the latest version of gaim was 0.78, or something, and KDE was still on 3.2.3. There are third-party repositories with more up-to-date stuff, however, but the fact remains that Mandrake is the black sheep of RPM-based distros, and is almost always last on the list when apps are packaged. All it really has going for it is a top-notch installer, hardware detection, and an inital configuration that doesn't need too much fiddling to get into an acceptable state (e.g. automounting of devices comes as standard) - things that I gather are matched, or at least soon will be, by e.g. Ubuntu. Keeping a Mandrake install up-to-date is a real chore, and is the reason I just switched to Gentoo (laugh all you want! :))
I'm a little more optimistic; it seems that there is at least some trend for hardware manufacturers (of e.g. Digital Cameras; TV Cards) to simply license and re-package older chips for which there is at least some Linux driver support. This will never happen with graphics cards, however, and unless that open-spec graphics card actually gets made (the one that was featured on slashdot last year; can't remember the name or link, sorry!), we'll probably always be reliant on the manufacturers to produce binary drivers.