I thought Real had significantly lessened the evilness of Realplayer lately... more specifically with Realplayer 10. Then again, that's just what I heard, I have no desire to find out myself.
The advisory wasn't entirely clear on who this affected, it's clear that it's an issue with reading or writing a DVD drive (from the/dev/hdc found in the code and the name of the function), but what privledges does the attacker need to use this exploit? Raw read/write to a DVD drive? Raw read only to a DVD drive? Plain read only? Anybody know for sure?
If you don't like tabbed browsing, you don't have to use it, you can open 20 $browser_of_choice windows if you so desire, but if you're like 99% of Slashdotters, you'll be infuriated when you can't open 20 tabs in default IE.
Actually both JuK and amaroK can make use of this to automagically retag your mp3/ogg files. I discovered this just a few days ago when I tried out JuK on a whim.
(Saw this comment while meta-moderating and had to reply...)
Posting from Konqueror on Linux, I'm pretty confident this exploit doesn't (directly) impact me, but it leads me to ask the question: How long until the Mozilla guys can patch this?
(if the above URL has a space in the word Immortal, don't blame me:) It looks fine in the comment, but the preview puts a space in. Anyone know why?)
Slash(?:code|dot) chops up any long strings of characters without spaces in them so that they have spaces in them. This is so that trolls can't mess with the page format (as easily) by putting in exceedingly long lines. There are a number of other components to the lameness filter that you'll probably stumble across sooner or later.
Hmmm, I've had my own problems with trying to change application defaults. For me the main thing has been trying to get my install on Debian which originally came from Knoppix to use Letter size paper instead of A4. I have to reset this for every document (if anyone knows how to change this please reply).
Have you tried looking in the CUPS config? That appears to be where you set the default paper size for a particular printer, among other things.
Employees and agents/contractors of Windows IT Pro [Penton Media, Inc.], or Microsoft and its respective parents, affiliated and subsidiary companies, and advertising and promotional agencies, and of prize sponsors, as well as the immediate family of such employees or members of their households are not eligible to participate in this challenge. Winner is responsible for all taxes and will be required to provide proof of identity. Sponsor: Windows IT Pro, Penton Media, Inc., 221 E. 29th Street, Loveland, CO 80538.
Hack IIS6 content? What contest? Oh, and you're being sued, have a nice day!
That depends on who you're talking about, to the typical Emailer/web surfer, Wine is already irrelevant. They can already Email people and surf the web just fine with any number of native Linux programs.
At the other end of the spectrum though, you will have large companies that have a pile of internal applications that run exclusively on Win32, making a move to Linux extremely difficult or largely pointless if they needed to use QEmu/VMWare on every PC just to run their internal applications. This is where Wine really shines, for applications that are needed, but have a low chance of being ported to Linux, and for which no native application exists. In the future they may decide to rewrite the applications to be native to Linux, but the chances of doing that as a part of the initial transion are low, as the time required to develop and test such applications is generally non-trivial.
I think in general, Wine is one of the catalysts for Linux adoption, which, ironically, will at the same time will cause it's own irrelevance at an accelerated rate. Without Wine, Linux adoption would be much slower than it is right now, even if only initially, people like to stick with what they're familiar with. Every person I know who has tried out Linux (including myself), has attempted to run the programs they used to use under Wine. I can also point out that they usually find native applications that replace the functionality of the programs they were running under Wine. I certainly did, and I no longer have a use for Wine, I've been running Linux exclusively for about 2 years now.
The one sticking point for a lot of users is still games however. Few Win32 games will ever be ported to Linux, and finding native games that can act as a replacement can be very difficult except for some of the most popular games, for example, the Civilization series => FreeCiv. Not to saythattherearen'tanygamesavailableforLinux, but if there was no Wine, the list would be significantly shortened, and many of the games that people want to play have no equivalant.
I don't think Wine will ever be completely irrelevant, but as it gets better, it will drive itself that way.
That's actually a very good idea, but not so much for new projects. As others have said, I think writing a portable application is a much better idea than writing a Win32/Wine tolerant application, as a truly portable application will run on far more than just Win32 and x86 Linux. Having said that though, just going through and tweaking (or implementing the missing pieces in Wine instead!) an already existing project so that it's also compatible with Wine is a pretty good idea. If you coupled something like this with QEmu/VMWare so that you could test a program out in Wine at the same time that you test it out on it's native platform, I think you'd be quite successful.
Personally, my favourite were the "Ready for Windows xx" stickers, they all ended up on one of my toilets. Unfortunately they wised up to this and changed the wording.
I had no trouble peeling off the Windows sticker from my Thinkpad, no gunk was left on afterwards either. The Pentium M sticker I left on initially though, after about a year it started slipping off and decided to take it off. It left a fair bit of gunk though, which was a bit of a pain to get rid of. In hindsight, I probably could have just used a bit of rubbing alcohol to good effect.
I did a co-op term for the Ministry of Transportation of Ontario just recently and I can tell you that they are exclusively using IBM Thinkpads, desktops and servers. I've never been excited about the desktops, and can't say much about the servers, but (typed from a Thinkpad T40) the Thinkpads are awesome machines. Very rugged, great Linux support and very light/thin with great battery life. They also come with one of the nicest keyboards on a laptop I've ever seen (with no blasted windows keys!), and they do have a nipple, which is of course the only proper pointing device for a laptop.
If I had the money, I'd buy up a couple more just in case, but I don't... I will accept donations though!
The way they supported more than 4G of memory was also a rather ugly hack...
That crippling with lots of memory is due to what many people describe as a major kludge in the Pentium architecture called Page Address Extensions (PAE). According to Torvalds, "the only real major failure of the x86 is the PAE crud". Seen here
Much has been made in the computer press recently of the surprising similarities between Longhorn and Apple's upcoming new Macintosh operating system, Tiger. (See Peter Lewis's recent column, Apple's 'Tiger' to Stalk Rivals April 29.) The bottom line is that both will make finding items in our ever-increasing digital stores of information and entertainment much easier. Longhorn doesn't just show you an icon for a document, for example, but rather an itsy-bitsy picture of the first page. If you have a really good monitor--and eyesight--you could even read the numbers in that spreadsheet. You also will be able to put files simultaneously in different folders, and find the one you want with much more ease than you can today. Microsoft's research shows that the average corporate employee spends about 20% of her time on the PC simply looking for items. "We're trying to go beyond search into what we call 'visualization and organization,'" said Allchin
Right. I got Panther to do this with a little tweaking, and from what I read, Tiger may be doing something similar. Talk about innovation...
Not to mention that OS/2 has had this feature since at least the Warp 4.0 days... (as in roughly 10 years ago). However, it may or may not have been an Object Desktop feature, to be honest, I can't remember.
If the average Linux user were educated on how to recognize a bug, and file a meaningful bug report it would mean a lot to developers, and likely speed up development and stability....and scare away 99.9% of potential new users.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought Real had significantly lessened the evilness of Realplayer lately... more specifically with Realplayer 10. Then again, that's just what I heard, I have no desire to find out myself.
The advisory wasn't entirely clear on who this affected, it's clear that it's an issue with reading or writing a DVD drive (from the /dev/hdc found in the code and the name of the function), but what privledges does the attacker need to use this exploit? Raw read/write to a DVD drive? Raw read only to a DVD drive? Plain read only? Anybody know for sure?
If you don't like tabbed browsing, you don't have to use it, you can open 20 $browser_of_choice windows if you so desire, but if you're like 99% of Slashdotters, you'll be infuriated when you can't open 20 tabs in default IE.
(Saw this comment while meta-moderating and had to reply...)
That applies only to xpi files, I believe.
Posting from Konqueror on Linux, I'm pretty confident this exploit doesn't (directly) impact me, but it leads me to ask the question: How long until the Mozilla guys can patch this?
I don't think we've ever considered Slashdot to be a good example of web design practices...
Slash(?:code|dot) chops up any long strings of characters without spaces in them so that they have spaces in them. This is so that trolls can't mess with the page format (as easily) by putting in exceedingly long lines. There are a number of other components to the lameness filter that you'll probably stumble across sooner or later.
And you let me know when you find a 200 Mhz 486, ok?
Have you tried looking in the CUPS config? That appears to be where you set the default paper size for a particular printer, among other things.
Hack IIS6 content? What contest? Oh, and you're being sued, have a nice day!
I'm still waiting on a refund for all of the Windows licenses I've been forced to buy over the years that I'll never use.
Arguably, there are significantly more Linux users than there are Mac users, although unfortunately I can't say the same for Windows, yet.
At the other end of the spectrum though, you will have large companies that have a pile of internal applications that run exclusively on Win32, making a move to Linux extremely difficult or largely pointless if they needed to use QEmu/VMWare on every PC just to run their internal applications. This is where Wine really shines, for applications that are needed, but have a low chance of being ported to Linux, and for which no native application exists. In the future they may decide to rewrite the applications to be native to Linux, but the chances of doing that as a part of the initial transion are low, as the time required to develop and test such applications is generally non-trivial.
I think in general, Wine is one of the catalysts for Linux adoption, which, ironically, will at the same time will cause it's own irrelevance at an accelerated rate. Without Wine, Linux adoption would be much slower than it is right now, even if only initially, people like to stick with what they're familiar with. Every person I know who has tried out Linux (including myself), has attempted to run the programs they used to use under Wine. I can also point out that they usually find native applications that replace the functionality of the programs they were running under Wine. I certainly did, and I no longer have a use for Wine, I've been running Linux exclusively for about 2 years now.
The one sticking point for a lot of users is still games however. Few Win32 games will ever be ported to Linux, and finding native games that can act as a replacement can be very difficult except for some of the most popular games, for example, the Civilization series => FreeCiv. Not to say that there aren't any games available for Linux, but if there was no Wine, the list would be significantly shortened, and many of the games that people want to play have no equivalant.
I don't think Wine will ever be completely irrelevant, but as it gets better, it will drive itself that way.
That's actually a very good idea, but not so much for new projects. As others have said, I think writing a portable application is a much better idea than writing a Win32/Wine tolerant application, as a truly portable application will run on far more than just Win32 and x86 Linux. Having said that though, just going through and tweaking (or implementing the missing pieces in Wine instead!) an already existing project so that it's also compatible with Wine is a pretty good idea. If you coupled something like this with QEmu/VMWare so that you could test a program out in Wine at the same time that you test it out on it's native platform, I think you'd be quite successful.
Does it run Linux? ...oh wait
I plead guilty to the first accusation, innocent to the second.
Have you tried Ctrl+Esc instead?
Personally, my favourite were the "Ready for Windows xx" stickers, they all ended up on one of my toilets. Unfortunately they wised up to this and changed the wording.
I had no trouble peeling off the Windows sticker from my Thinkpad, no gunk was left on afterwards either. The Pentium M sticker I left on initially though, after about a year it started slipping off and decided to take it off. It left a fair bit of gunk though, which was a bit of a pain to get rid of. In hindsight, I probably could have just used a bit of rubbing alcohol to good effect.
If I had the money, I'd buy up a couple more just in case, but I don't... I will accept donations though!
I wonder if they'd be overclocking tolerant, and if so, I also wonder how well they'd work in a beowulf cluster...
That crippling with lots of memory is due to what many people describe as a major kludge in the Pentium architecture called Page Address Extensions (PAE). According to Torvalds, "the only real major failure of the x86 is the PAE crud".
Seen here
Right. I got Panther to do this with a little tweaking, and from what I read, Tiger may be doing something similar. Talk about innovation...
Not to mention that OS/2 has had this feature since at least the Warp 4.0 days... (as in roughly 10 years ago). However, it may or may not have been an Object Desktop feature, to be honest, I can't remember.
If the average Linux user were educated on how to recognize a bug, and file a meaningful bug report it would mean a lot to developers, and likely speed up development and stability. ...and scare away 99.9% of potential new users.