Word Services allows any application to link to a speller, grammar checker or other text service as if it is built-in.
It's a huge advantage to the user because a single GUI spellchecker can be shared between all their applications. Also once a program that uses text is Word Services-enabled, the user can add new text services as they are produced without any further effort on the part of the original application programmer.
It is a public protocol. No license fee or nondisclosure is required to use it. There is a free developer kit for the systems that currently support it.
It was originally written on the MacOS, where it used Apple Events and the Apple Object Model (which is also the basis for Apple Script). It was later implemented on the BeOS BeOS where it uses BMessages and the BeOS scripting API which is implemented in the BeOS Application Kit.
I have it in mind to implement it in XWindows on top of the CORBA interface that is used for scripting in Gnome.
I haven't had time to work on a Gnome version yet but if someone else wants to play with this email me at crawford@goingware.com and we can discuss how it could be done.
For some weird reason, web browsing doesn't work anymore when I boot Windows NT on my laptop.
I think there's a hack or a virus or maybe just some corruption.
That's OK for me, I just run Netscape under Gnome from my Linux partition. Get real good network performace.
But when my poor fiance has to use my machine for web browsing, it nearly drives her to hysterics. She's learned how to use Windows and anything different really disturbs her.
Now, you could say "just get used to it and she'll be happy" but I think there are some real serious UI errors in Gnome that will affect its acceptance among people who are not expert users.
Chief among these is the way it switches desktops when you move the mouse off the screen. That really threw her and cause me trouble still. I don't think it should be possible to switch desktops by moving the mouse. I like the way it is done in the BeOS, where you hit a key combo (like switching virtual consoles when you're not running X) or clicking on a window that gives a menu of desktops.
But throwing the whole screen display sideways just because the mouse drifted a little is unforgiveable.
The other problem is that a default installation of Gnome with enlightment clutters up the screen with zillions of little icons. I mostly ignore these except when I have to fish under them to press on a taskbar button in Gnome 1.2. My fiance wanted to know how to get rid of them and I couldn't tell her - she wanted to view a web page full screen so there'd be a maximum view and you couldn't accidentally bring the focus to the wrong window.
While I think Gnome has the stated purpose of making Linux easier to use, I think it is having the opposite effect. I think it is worthwhile to have advanced features that are not installed by default but the default behaviour should be something that a novice can use.
You don't have to make it look like windows - get someone who's never used windows or macos before (hard to find these days, but there are some), sit them down in front of your linux box and videotape them working with the system.
Does anyone else have old examples of the future vision of the net from 1970 or before?
Consider that what people in the past thought today would be like, with flying cars and stuff, rather than what we have.
Cars haven't changed substantially but a technology that is really simple in principle is steadily changing society - one that doesn't seem to have been widely predicted.
I only use SSH (secure shell) and SCP (secure copy) to access my web hosting service.
There are not many web hosting services that allow you shell access at all, let alone secure shell. One that does is the one I use, Seagull Networks.
The funny thing is I use SCP to upload my web pages. Anyone on the net who wants to can look at my web pages after they're uploaded, but they won't have my password.
Do you use a different password for important sites like your web host from the many websites out there that require passwords for you to register for some service? Good.
Even better is if you use a different password for every website you register one, because some of the websites offering some useful service may be doing double duty as password stealers.
Since most people use the same password everywhere a site can give you, say, a free trial of some porn in return for your password and email and then hack your oaccount.
I would suggest that any university or company do what Apple did when I worked there and require the combination of a password and a cryptographically generated key that's made by some device.
At Apple I had a little credit-card device that showed a different password each minute. I think they basically calculate a new secure hash every minute from the old one, combined with a password that's programmed into the unit but not visible to the user.
Interestingly, most of the hot software found in such boolean searches as:
download AND crack AND photoshop AND word AND illustrator
is on public webpages like freeyellow and geocities, and most of the sites are shut down before you get there. But for any shrink-wrap commercial software product you can name, it doesn't take more than an hour or two of searching to find a good download for it.
It happens that Microsoft has a full-time staff doing searches such as these with their own spider to find stashes of Windows 2000; I understand they find and shut down something like 100 sites a day. (Sorry, I tried to find a news report about this to link to and couldn't.)
Maybe Microsoft is able to minimize the impact of piracy this way, but I don't think they can completely eliminate it. Any normal software company simply doesn't have the resources to search out and elimate the warez like Microsoft tries to.
How could anyone hope to control something as popularly appealing and easy to obtain and use as music files?
If you presently use Napster and want something more resistant to being shut down (or are curious what this is all about and want to see for yourself):
Gnutella is better than napster for a number of reasons. Chief among them is that it will share any kind of file, not just MP3's, and you can configure the port it uses, so it is hard to block with packet filters. Also there is no central server so there's no chokepoint of control like there is for Napster.
It is a public protocol and implementations of it are available on most platforms in common use (Java, *nix, MacOS, BeOS, Windows). Source code is provided for some versions.
The homepage for Gnutella is http://gnutella.wego.com. The download page that lists all the available versions is here.
I find that gtk_gnutella works well on Linux. It is a work in progress so it doesn't yet implement sharing but it does search for an download files well. It is under the GNU General Public License and its homepage is http://gtk-gnutella.sourceforge.net/
Ah, but the real challenge of the job was that part of the MacOS test suite was to try it out with a few hundred application programs.
Sometimes it happened that an app would fail on a new system build - and then it would come to me.
Without source code to the app and usually no cooperation from the vendor, I'd use MacsBug to determine whether the problem was a real new bug in the system, or an old latent bug in the third party app that we just happened to stimulate.
I could tell some stories but probably shouldn't. More than a few developers were suprised to get calls from me detailing how they should fix their old code.
A lot of people are griping about how SlackWare 7.1 is being released just before kernel 2.4.0 is.
I think it is important to understand that a widely used distribution should not use a kernel until it has been used in widespread production for several months.
Anyone who knows what they are doing can download the kernel source and compile it themselves. I've been using the kernel 2.4.0-testX-acX series on my Slackware 7 installation for some time now, and it works well.
But there is a huge number of combinations of configurations out in the world, and there really is no way that the kernel can be adequately tested by the people who presently are testing it.
Once the 2.4.0 final kernel is released a lot more people will download and compile it than have been using it yet, and guess what? Bugs will be found.
That's why we have minor releases.
But a commercial distribution gets used by a lot of people who do not want to be testers, or would not be competent to diagnose their own systems if there was a problem.
You may say that Slackware is for the hardcore sorts (does that make me one? Gee, but I write MacOS GUI code for a living!.) but the fact is a lot of people will get Slackware for their very first experience with Linux just because they see it on a store shelf somewhere and decide to try it out.
Give Patrick a break.
And remember some wisdom a customer passed to me when I was working tech support in a bygone era: Don't buy version 1.0 of anything.
If you're wondering where the new version is, watch for the file THIS_ISNT_DONE_UPLOADING at slackware-current to disappear.
There's a note in the file that says it will disappear when the upload is done. Apparently the Slashdot article got posted when the release was announced, but the loading of the files is still in progress!
I've been running slackware for several years now, and am currently running it on my Compaq Presario 1800T Laptop
I've been running Slackware 7 with the 2.4.0-test series of kernels and have generally had good results with it.
One thing I don't like about Slackware though is that it's never had much of a concept of upgrading from a previous version, and so won't automatically delete files it is replacing during an upgrade. This once resulted in filling my root partition during an upgrade and made my machine unbootable.
For that reason I've gotten Debian to use on the server I'm building. But I expect I'll put 7.1 on my laptop.
The Forum on Risks to the Public in Computer and Related Systems discusses problems such as this regularly. It is available as comp.risks on the Usenet News and at http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/ on the Web.
The Risks forum should be read by:
Anyone who uses or depends on computers in their daily lives
Anyone who programs computers
Anyone who makes policy decisions involving computers or software
Anyone who ever depends on the correct functioning of computers for their lives or safety (flown on a modern airplane lately?)
Anyone who operates computers that affect safety (piloted one?)
I think that includes most readers of Slashdot.
You might think such spy stuff as this article is about is out of your realm, but consider this example which likely could have affected most of us:
I recently received a legal document as part of a personal negotiation that I am doing. The document was e-mailed to me in MSWord format. As I was showing it to my lawyer (who happens to be my wife), we decided to put our thoughts inline using the track changes feature of word. After selecting Tools, and Track Changes, we clicked on "Highlight changes in document" and voila, suddenly a whole bunch of red appeared on the screen. We looked at it closely and realized that everything in red represented changes in the document that my counterpart's lawyer had written. We got a good look at the previous version of the contract, as well as a bunch of comments and justifications that the lawyer wrote to his client. It was an eye opening experience.
It appears that instead of selecting "Accept all changes" before sending it to me, the other party to the contract simply turned off the highlighting to the track changes feature.
This is obviously a case of an unsophisticated person misusing a feature. However, it is very dangerous. Lawyers send word documents around all the time, and many of them do not really understand all the features that they use, nor should they have to. I imagine that I was not the first person to see some behind the scenes conversation in an important word document, that I was never intended to see.
Peter G. Neumann, moderator of the Risks forum, wrote a book called Computer Related Risks that draws on material from the forum and discusses it in more depth. It has ISBN 020155805X and you can purchase it from:
If you teach a course on programming, I suggest adding this to the recommended reading, and if you teach a course on fault tolerant or embedded computing, I urge you to include it in the required reading.
Sad to say, I've had similar experiences with Be, Inc.'s treatment of developers. While I feel that the BeOS is a technically superior operating system for desktop machines, I think the only sensible route for a small third-party developer is to develop for an operating system which is GPL'ed.
I don't care squat about the MPAA or Doubleclick. I want to be able to post anything I damn well please on my website without interference from the government.
It's important to understand that the reason that reverse engineering is legal, is that if a company wants protection for its technology, they ought to patent it.
The whole point of patents is to bring innovations into the public domain in return for granting a monopoly of limited duration.
A company that chooses to use trade secrets instead of a patent is declining the protection that patents offer, and is also withholding innovations from ultimately being in the public domain. There is no public interest in giving them protection.
I would suggest that for this reason reverse engineering is in the public interest. Either the innovation is brought to light forceably, or the company follows the proper route and brings it to light with proper documentation as is required by a patent.
I don't know much about reverse engineering hardware, but I thought you might find it interesting to know how I reverse-engineered a file format.
A company wanted to allow its own movie production management product interoperate with a motion picture project management database. It was like a regular project management tool that had specialization for things of interest to the movie industry, for example there was a specific category for scheduling potted plants to be present on the set as well as manage the expenses involved with these things.
I think it was called Movie Magic Scheduling.
The publishers of movie magic were very protective about thier product and didn't want to cooperate with my clients, so they hired me to reverse engineer the product.
The initial agreement was that I would do this in a week for $1500. It took three weeks and I was working long days, but in the end I was able to take the whole production schedule for an actual full-lenth motion picture and run it through a parser I wrote that dumped it out into an intelligently interpreted text file.
I started by doing this: I created a new, blank document. Then I created a second document with one of the fields containing only the letter "A". Then I made hex dumps and used a comparison tool to compare the hex dumps.
I quickly found that there was lots of unexplained junk in the files so I wrote two tools that I would run before launching Movie Magic to create each document. This was on a Macintosh. One tool would allocate all available memory, set it to zero, then free it and quit. The other tool would create a large file set it to zero and quit.
Note that on Unix systems writing a page full of zeroes to a file is optimized to not write any data at all; however on a properly written system virtual memory pages and disk sectors are zeroed before being allocated to prevent leaking of confidential information.
Then basically I would note what change in the file and make a hypothesis as to what the cause of the change was, and test out my hypothesis by trying to predict what a further change in the file would do.
I wrote two things to document this, one a file format spec in a word processor, second a C program to parse the file. As my knowledge of the structure got more complex, I could implement the knowledge in the file parser and start dumping files through it until an error occurred. Then I could look more closely at what caused the exception.
The key to being able to do this I got from Robert Ward's book Debugging C (I think it is out of print). That is simply to use the scientific method when debugging software (or reverse engineering it).
The scientific method is simple in principle but it takes some discipline and creativity to use it effectively.
Observe something
Make a hypothesis as to why that was observed
Design an experiment that will test that hypothesis. It is important that your experiment tests the hypothesis that you have made, and not something different.
Carry out the experiment to see if it confirms your hypothesis.
If it does, you have learned something
If it doesn't, you have to make a new hypothesis
All the while you keep watching out of the corner of your eye for weird things to happen.
One thing that helped a lot with this is that I'd spent a lot of time working with word processor file formats while maintaining a spellchecker, and I'd designed a binary graphics format. So I knew what were the common things to do in a file format, and a lot of things could be guessed directly.
It would have been a lot harder if the format was designed to be hard to reverse engineer, but the information has to go somewhere. Even with encrypted data, with a situation like mine you can do what is called "chosen plaintext cryptanalysis".
For another example of that, during World War II we'd cracked the Japanese cipher, but in addition to the cipher the Japanese used code words. To crack the code words, when we suspected that the Japanese used a certain code (call it "FOO") to refer to midway island, naval intelligence sent a command to Midway via secure channels asking them to report that their water desalinator was broken down - through insecure channels.
After Midway sent the request for a new desalinator, we intercepted a japanese transmission saying that "FOO" had a broken desalinator. Because they had also said they were preparing a major attack on "FOO", we knew to meet them with our aircraft carriers.
The choice of hypothesis is a problem here. Robert Pirsig talks about this in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance. For any given observation, there are a large number, possibly infinite number of hypotheses that would fit the observed facts.
Choosing which one is worth taking the trouble to test calls for scientific creativity; ultimately the choice is based on scientific quality, and one mark of a good scientist is that they have a sense of what is right - and the flexibility to recognize that their sense can be wrong.
Please read my page Why You Should Use Encryption. This explains why ordinary people, even your mother and your kids, ought to be using secure encryption.
Also read my note Secure Email Download with SSH on the Be Tip Server. While the tip is BeOS specific, the basic ideas work fine on other operating systems.
Of course, to download your mail via SSH, you'll need a hosting service that provides it at their end, which is why I recommend Seagull Networks. Note that if you upload content to your website with FTP, you're exposing your password to network sniffers. Seagull Networks allows you to use secure copy (scp) for this so your password remains secure.
Finally, I use the Linux Encrypting Kernel under Linux and PGPDisk under Windows to keep important personal info like my Quicken checkbook, and confidential business information like the source code I'm writing for my clients encrypted on my laptop so the theives won't have them if my computer is stolen.
With either one you can create a big file that when mounted with a passphrase is accessible like any ordinary filesystem. I have even found that I can run MPEG movies off a PGPDisks with no loss in playback quality on my laptop which has a 450 MHz Pentium III.
Finally read the Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems for significant discussions on privacy issues. It is available as comp.risks on the Usenet News and on the web at http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/.
Do you think Microsoft takes care to protect your privacy when designing its products? Guess again.
I recently received a legal document as part of a personal negotiation that I am doing. The document was e-mailed to me in MSWord format. As I was showing it to my lawyer (who happens to be my wife), we decided to put our thoughts inline using the track changes feature of word. After selecting Tools, and Track Changes, we clicked on "Highlight changes in document" and voila, suddenly a whole bunch of red appeared on the screen. We looked at it closely and realized that everything in red represented changes in the document that my counterpart's lawyer had written. We got a good look at the previous version of the contract, as well as a bunch of comments and justifications that the lawyer wrote to his client. It was an eye opening experience.
It appears that instead of selecting "Accept all changes" before sending it to me, the other party to the contract simply turned off the highlighting to the track changes feature.
This is obviously a case of an unsophisticated person misusing a feature. However, it is very dangerous. Lawyers send word documents around all the time, and many of them do not really understand all the features that they use, nor should they have to. I imagine that I was not the first person to see some behind the scenes conversation in an important word document, that I was never intended to see.
One of the whole points about multitasking operating systems is that you can do more than one thing at once.
For example, you could have a web browser, email client and streaming audio show going on at the same time in most OSes.
But in the BeOS, all of these different programs could be individually making audio and they'd be mixed together.
It happened that the test I did sounded really cool. If they were all at high volume there was a cacophonous roar. At low volume it sounded like a crowded subway station, and as you varied the volume of each song it would be as if you were walking among the crowd and approaching people carrying radios, then they'd recede.
I've tried to play sound files on windows NT while I had realaudio going, and I got a rude alert saying the device was busy. After all these years I'd spent working with the BeOS, I thought that was really lame. Isn't NT supposed to have architecture?
The fact is the human ear can pick out individual conversations from a crowded room (most people can, I can do it well even though my hearing is damaged by my fiance can't). With multiple audio streams (BeOS can do multiple video streams too) all of your programs can be making sound and you can just tune into the one you want to listen to, or raise the volume on the one you were interested in.
Spellswell is an always has been a profitable product on the MacOS, and one Windows where it is available as an OEM spellchecker.
Even at the lowest point of Apple's difficulties, the MacOS spellswell brought in substantially more revenue than BeOS Spellswell ever did.
The core dictionary engine is the same, only the UI is different between the two products. While the Word Services protocol is different between the two platforms, they work in an analogous way.
A big difference between me and Gobe is that they had funding for marketing and I had no funding at all. The only investment I was able to make on my own was my time. The whole time I was shipping Spellswell I expected Be to get started and get serious about marketing its own product soon. That day never came.
The best thing they did for me was give the OS away for free. But at the same time they stopped development of the desktop OS and made it clear they weren't going to support desktop developers anymore. We don't even get BeOS 5 Pro for free as part of our developer program membership. They shut down the BeWare online software catalog.
Very early on Be promised to make things better for developers in the market by fashioning itself as an Internet company which would promote products online. We wouldn't have to deal with distribution channels anymore but just sell our products through BeDepot. I think that was an excellent idea but their actual execution of it was amazingly incompetent.
It has a lot to do with Be's failure to adopt the Word Services Suite, which is the interapplication communication protocol based on BMessages that enables Spellswell to communicate with other applications.
Rather than take advantage of my work to bring this protocol to the BeOS - it is an open protocol and allows any text service to be linked to an email client, not just spellchecking - Be instead wrote their own spellchecker for email.
The only other email client to implement Word Services on the BeOS, Mail-It from BeatWare became a free product after BeatWare abandoned the BeOS market and ported their ePicture graphics editor to Mac and Windows where it is selling very well.
If you don't think I have good reason to be pissed at Be, why don't you ask Marc Verstaen, the President of Beatware, what he thinks of Be after he and a group of investors wasted several million dollars developing desktop software for the BeOS?
There were only a few substantial commercial companies solely devoted to BeOS development and Beatware was one of the best. Now they are a Mac and Windows shop.
I'm quite happy developing for the BeOS. What disgusts me are the lack of sales for my existing product, Spellswell, because Be never lived up to its commitment to provide adequate marketing for its own product.
My monthly royalties from Spellswell just about buy dinner for me and my fiance. One dinner. In recent months it wouldn't include a bottle of wine with that dinner.
I haven't tried them for colocation services (although I've discussed it with the webmaster) but I heavily recommend Seagull Networks. I use them for hosting several domains I own and always recommend them to people who ask me.
Here's why:
They allow shell access via telnet and secure shell
Supporting ssh allows me to use secure copy (scp) to upload content
I can read my email via a shell login with Pine or Elm without downloading all my mail (important when one uses several operating systems)
I can write my own CGI's in any programming language I want and install them myself. They provide the gnu development tools.
They have excellent customer service. I've sent in questions in the middle of the night and got back authoritative answers within the hour.
Their prices are quite reasonable - $25 a month for basic virtual domain hosting, which might seem high but you get the shell access and secure shell
Write to seagull@seagull.net if you want to ask the webmaster about colocation. That's not really their specialty but hosting is.
In addition my fiance has two domains there and a friend has two domains there under my account (there's a discount for reselling the service - your first account is free but more under the same billing are cheaper).
I didn't try Linux when I wrote this comparison of the audio performance of MacOS, Windows and BeOS, but I don't think Linux would have fared much better than Mac or Windows:
I was able to play nine uncompressed CD quality audio files simultaneously and independently vary the volume on each on the BeOS. I was never able to play more than one on the other operating systems I tried. I could play up to two tracks simultaneously from an ISO 9660 CD before the seek time of the head broke up the sound.
I've found in the 2.4.0-test1-acX kernels that audio streams will just plain stop until I click on or drag around an XWindow. Posts I've seen on the Linux kernel mailing list suggest that X is failing to yield the PCI bus at times.
I'm not suggesting though that you should all go use BeOS for your sound. What I do suggest is improving the multimedia architecture of Linux until it can match the BeOS.
I am a long-time BeOS developer and until recently I was a very active member of the bedevtalk@be.com developer mailing list.
I am one of the few developers to actually ship a commercial application, Spellswell from Working Software. I've kept Spellswell actively maintained over a couple of years, it is now at version 1.0.5.
So I didn't appreciate it when Be announced it was dropping active support for the desktop and "refocusing" on Internet Appliances.
Now promoting the system for Internet appliances is fine, but Be had spent years promoting its system as a platform for multimedia content creation, and in my view it is the best platform for desktop software. Check out, for instance, Gobe Software'sGobe Productive, one of the best integrated applications available.
While Be still has a desktop operating system and gives it away for free, it has made it clear that there will be no further desktop-specific development for the operating system; if a feature or bug-fix makes it into the system it will be because it is needed for Internet Appliances, and not because it is needed for the desktop.
I repeatedly tried to bring this failure to live up to its commitments on bedevtalk and beusertalk and while other professional developers supported my position, I was constantly shot down by the hobbyists and Be's own employees.
Finally I tried to point out the error of their ways in some detail by posting this to bedevtalk:
in which I pointed out that the appropriate response to criticism from developers like me would be for Be employees who subscribe to the list to communicate our concerns to senior management.
Before you decide to devote time and energy to developing BeOS software, I ask you to consider whether you wish to take the risk to invest your time and money in a system that is only available from a company that has not only proved it cannot keep its commitments, it has stated repeatedly it does not want its dishonesty pointed out to it and will actively work to censor those who would work to correct its behaviour.
One of the reasons I am working to reorient my consulting business to take primarily Linux work is that I feel it is a mistake for any third party software developer to depend on any API, particularly an operating system, that they do not have the source code to.
If you feel you must support a closed-source operating system or API, I urge you to require the API vendor to sign a contract guaranteeing they will support the API forever - both in terms of maintainence and marketing - or else they will reimburse you for your lost revenue and opportunity cost if they fail to live up to their commitments.
BTW - My fiance told me that being unsubscribed from bedevtalk is like being kicked off the design committee for the Edsel. It's a beautiful OS and the engineering quality is excellent, but the sales prevention team there, uh, I mean the management, is determined to do everything they can to prevent the business from succeeding.
Perhaps Internet Appliances are a good idea, but after the galling lack of marketing cluefulness shown when they were on the desktop I seriously doubt they can get it together to succeed in the Internet Appliance arena either.
If you are an Internet Appliance manufacturer, think about whether you want to make your livelihood dependent on a company with a proven track record of failing to live up to its commitments. Consider that in many was QNX is a better OS for appliance and you can get a developer kit for free.
I don't think Linux is a very good platform either for the desktop or Internet Appliances but because it is free software that problem is capable of being addressed.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.wordservices.org
Word Services allows any application to link to a speller, grammar checker or other text service as if it is built-in.
It's a huge advantage to the user because a single GUI spellchecker can be shared between all their applications. Also once a program that uses text is Word Services-enabled, the user can add new text services as they are produced without any further effort on the part of the original application programmer.
It is a public protocol. No license fee or nondisclosure is required to use it. There is a free developer kit for the systems that currently support it.
It was originally written on the MacOS, where it used Apple Events and the Apple Object Model (which is also the basis for Apple Script). It was later implemented on the BeOS BeOS where it uses BMessages and the BeOS scripting API which is implemented in the BeOS Application Kit.
I have it in mind to implement it in XWindows on top of the CORBA interface that is used for scripting in Gnome.
I haven't had time to work on a Gnome version yet but if someone else wants to play with this email me at crawford@goingware.com and we can discuss how it could be done.
I think there's a hack or a virus or maybe just some corruption.
That's OK for me, I just run Netscape under Gnome from my Linux partition. Get real good network performace.
But when my poor fiance has to use my machine for web browsing, it nearly drives her to hysterics. She's learned how to use Windows and anything different really disturbs her.
Now, you could say "just get used to it and she'll be happy" but I think there are some real serious UI errors in Gnome that will affect its acceptance among people who are not expert users.
Chief among these is the way it switches desktops when you move the mouse off the screen. That really threw her and cause me trouble still. I don't think it should be possible to switch desktops by moving the mouse. I like the way it is done in the BeOS, where you hit a key combo (like switching virtual consoles when you're not running X) or clicking on a window that gives a menu of desktops.
But throwing the whole screen display sideways just because the mouse drifted a little is unforgiveable.
The other problem is that a default installation of Gnome with enlightment clutters up the screen with zillions of little icons. I mostly ignore these except when I have to fish under them to press on a taskbar button in Gnome 1.2. My fiance wanted to know how to get rid of them and I couldn't tell her - she wanted to view a web page full screen so there'd be a maximum view and you couldn't accidentally bring the focus to the wrong window.
While I think Gnome has the stated purpose of making Linux easier to use, I think it is having the opposite effect. I think it is worthwhile to have advanced features that are not installed by default but the default behaviour should be something that a novice can use.
You don't have to make it look like windows - get someone who's never used windows or macos before (hard to find these days, but there are some), sit them down in front of your linux box and videotape them working with the system.
Do these for your individual applications too.
Consider that what people in the past thought today would be like, with flying cars and stuff, rather than what we have.
Cars haven't changed substantially but a technology that is really simple in principle is steadily changing society - one that doesn't seem to have been widely predicted.
There are not many web hosting services that allow you shell access at all, let alone secure shell. One that does is the one I use, Seagull Networks.
The funny thing is I use SCP to upload my web pages. Anyone on the net who wants to can look at my web pages after they're uploaded, but they won't have my password.
Do you use a different password for important sites like your web host from the many websites out there that require passwords for you to register for some service? Good.
Even better is if you use a different password for every website you register one, because some of the websites offering some useful service may be doing double duty as password stealers.
Since most people use the same password everywhere a site can give you, say, a free trial of some porn in return for your password and email and then hack your oaccount.
I would suggest that any university or company do what Apple did when I worked there and require the combination of a password and a cryptographically generated key that's made by some device.
At Apple I had a little credit-card device that showed a different password each minute. I think they basically calculate a new secure hash every minute from the old one, combined with a password that's programmed into the unit but not visible to the user.
See my page on why everyone should use encryption.
Interestingly, most of the hot software found in such boolean searches as:
is on public webpages like freeyellow and geocities, and most of the sites are shut down before you get there. But for any shrink-wrap commercial software product you can name, it doesn't take more than an hour or two of searching to find a good download for it.
It happens that Microsoft has a full-time staff doing searches such as these with their own spider to find stashes of Windows 2000; I understand they find and shut down something like 100 sites a day. (Sorry, I tried to find a news report about this to link to and couldn't.)
Maybe Microsoft is able to minimize the impact of piracy this way, but I don't think they can completely eliminate it. Any normal software company simply doesn't have the resources to search out and elimate the warez like Microsoft tries to.
How could anyone hope to control something as popularly appealing and easy to obtain and use as music files?
Gnutella is better than napster for a number of reasons. Chief among them is that it will share any kind of file, not just MP3's, and you can configure the port it uses, so it is hard to block with packet filters. Also there is no central server so there's no chokepoint of control like there is for Napster.
It is a public protocol and implementations of it are available on most platforms in common use (Java, *nix, MacOS, BeOS, Windows). Source code is provided for some versions.
The homepage for Gnutella is http://gnutella.wego.com. The download page that lists all the available versions is here.
I find that gtk_gnutella works well on Linux. It is a work in progress so it doesn't yet implement sharing but it does search for an download files well. It is under the GNU General Public License and its homepage is http://gtk-gnutella.sourceforge.net/
Sometimes it happened that an app would fail on a new system build - and then it would come to me.
Without source code to the app and usually no cooperation from the vendor, I'd use MacsBug to determine whether the problem was a real new bug in the system, or an old latent bug in the third party app that we just happened to stimulate.
I could tell some stories but probably shouldn't. More than a few developers were suprised to get calls from me detailing how they should fix their old code.
I think it is important to understand that a widely used distribution should not use a kernel until it has been used in widespread production for several months.
Anyone who knows what they are doing can download the kernel source and compile it themselves. I've been using the kernel 2.4.0-testX-acX series on my Slackware 7 installation for some time now, and it works well.
But there is a huge number of combinations of configurations out in the world, and there really is no way that the kernel can be adequately tested by the people who presently are testing it.
Once the 2.4.0 final kernel is released a lot more people will download and compile it than have been using it yet, and guess what? Bugs will be found.
That's why we have minor releases.
But a commercial distribution gets used by a lot of people who do not want to be testers, or would not be competent to diagnose their own systems if there was a problem.
You may say that Slackware is for the hardcore sorts (does that make me one? Gee, but I write MacOS GUI code for a living!.) but the fact is a lot of people will get Slackware for their very first experience with Linux just because they see it on a store shelf somewhere and decide to try it out.
Give Patrick a break.
And remember some wisdom a customer passed to me when I was working tech support in a bygone era: Don't buy version 1.0 of anything.
There's a note in the file that says it will disappear when the upload is done. Apparently the Slashdot article got posted when the release was announced, but the loading of the files is still in progress!
Eagerly,
I've been running Slackware 7 with the 2.4.0-test series of kernels and have generally had good results with it.
One thing I don't like about Slackware though is that it's never had much of a concept of upgrading from a previous version, and so won't automatically delete files it is replacing during an upgrade. This once resulted in filling my root partition during an upgrade and made my machine unbootable.
For that reason I've gotten Debian to use on the server I'm building. But I expect I'll put 7.1 on my laptop.
What I'm trying to accomplish is to get Slashdot readers to read the risks forum.
I feel that's very important.
I think the future of society is at stake if we programmers don't take heed to what's regularly discussed in risks.
If you look at the rest of my posts, you see I have no problem getting karma. It's just a matter of posting relevant, interesting, on-topic posts.
The Risks forum should be read by:
- Anyone who uses or depends on computers in their daily lives
- Anyone who programs computers
- Anyone who makes policy decisions involving computers or software
- Anyone who ever depends on the correct functioning of computers for their lives or safety (flown on a modern airplane lately?)
- Anyone who operates computers that affect safety (piloted one?)
I think that includes most readers of Slashdot.You might think such spy stuff as this article is about is out of your realm, but consider this example which likely could have affected most of us:
Peter G. Neumann, moderator of the Risks forum, wrote a book called Computer Related Risks that draws on material from the forum and discusses it in more depth. It has ISBN 020155805X and you can purchase it from:- http://www.fatbrain.com
- http://www.barnesandnoble.com
- http://www.amazon.com
- http://www.chapters.ca - in Canada
If you teach a course on programming, I suggest adding this to the recommended reading, and if you teach a course on fault tolerant or embedded computing, I urge you to include it in the required reading.Sad to say, I've had similar experiences with Be, Inc.'s treatment of developers. While I feel that the BeOS is a technically superior operating system for desktop machines, I think the only sensible route for a small third-party developer is to develop for an operating system which is GPL'ed.
Mike
Mike
The whole point of patents is to bring innovations into the public domain in return for granting a monopoly of limited duration.
A company that chooses to use trade secrets instead of a patent is declining the protection that patents offer, and is also withholding innovations from ultimately being in the public domain. There is no public interest in giving them protection.
I would suggest that for this reason reverse engineering is in the public interest. Either the innovation is brought to light forceably, or the company follows the proper route and brings it to light with proper documentation as is required by a patent.
A company wanted to allow its own movie production management product interoperate with a motion picture project management database. It was like a regular project management tool that had specialization for things of interest to the movie industry, for example there was a specific category for scheduling potted plants to be present on the set as well as manage the expenses involved with these things.
I think it was called Movie Magic Scheduling.
The publishers of movie magic were very protective about thier product and didn't want to cooperate with my clients, so they hired me to reverse engineer the product.
The initial agreement was that I would do this in a week for $1500. It took three weeks and I was working long days, but in the end I was able to take the whole production schedule for an actual full-lenth motion picture and run it through a parser I wrote that dumped it out into an intelligently interpreted text file.
I started by doing this: I created a new, blank document. Then I created a second document with one of the fields containing only the letter "A". Then I made hex dumps and used a comparison tool to compare the hex dumps.
I quickly found that there was lots of unexplained junk in the files so I wrote two tools that I would run before launching Movie Magic to create each document. This was on a Macintosh. One tool would allocate all available memory, set it to zero, then free it and quit. The other tool would create a large file set it to zero and quit.
Note that on Unix systems writing a page full of zeroes to a file is optimized to not write any data at all; however on a properly written system virtual memory pages and disk sectors are zeroed before being allocated to prevent leaking of confidential information.
Then basically I would note what change in the file and make a hypothesis as to what the cause of the change was, and test out my hypothesis by trying to predict what a further change in the file would do.
I wrote two things to document this, one a file format spec in a word processor, second a C program to parse the file. As my knowledge of the structure got more complex, I could implement the knowledge in the file parser and start dumping files through it until an error occurred. Then I could look more closely at what caused the exception.
The key to being able to do this I got from Robert Ward's book Debugging C (I think it is out of print). That is simply to use the scientific method when debugging software (or reverse engineering it).
The scientific method is simple in principle but it takes some discipline and creativity to use it effectively.
- Observe something
- Make a hypothesis as to why that was observed
- Design an experiment that will test that hypothesis. It is important that your experiment tests the hypothesis that you have made, and not something different.
- Carry out the experiment to see if it confirms your hypothesis.
- If it does, you have learned something
- If it doesn't, you have to make a new hypothesis
All the while you keep watching out of the corner of your eye for weird things to happen.One thing that helped a lot with this is that I'd spent a lot of time working with word processor file formats while maintaining a spellchecker, and I'd designed a binary graphics format. So I knew what were the common things to do in a file format, and a lot of things could be guessed directly.
It would have been a lot harder if the format was designed to be hard to reverse engineer, but the information has to go somewhere. Even with encrypted data, with a situation like mine you can do what is called "chosen plaintext cryptanalysis".
For another example of that, during World War II we'd cracked the Japanese cipher, but in addition to the cipher the Japanese used code words. To crack the code words, when we suspected that the Japanese used a certain code (call it "FOO") to refer to midway island, naval intelligence sent a command to Midway via secure channels asking them to report that their water desalinator was broken down - through insecure channels.
After Midway sent the request for a new desalinator, we intercepted a japanese transmission saying that "FOO" had a broken desalinator. Because they had also said they were preparing a major attack on "FOO", we knew to meet them with our aircraft carriers.
The choice of hypothesis is a problem here. Robert Pirsig talks about this in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance. For any given observation, there are a large number, possibly infinite number of hypotheses that would fit the observed facts.
Choosing which one is worth taking the trouble to test calls for scientific creativity; ultimately the choice is based on scientific quality, and one mark of a good scientist is that they have a sense of what is right - and the flexibility to recognize that their sense can be wrong.
Also read my note Secure Email Download with SSH on the Be Tip Server. While the tip is BeOS specific, the basic ideas work fine on other operating systems.
Of course, to download your mail via SSH, you'll need a hosting service that provides it at their end, which is why I recommend Seagull Networks. Note that if you upload content to your website with FTP, you're exposing your password to network sniffers. Seagull Networks allows you to use secure copy (scp) for this so your password remains secure.
Finally, I use the Linux Encrypting Kernel under Linux and PGPDisk under Windows to keep important personal info like my Quicken checkbook, and confidential business information like the source code I'm writing for my clients encrypted on my laptop so the theives won't have them if my computer is stolen.
With either one you can create a big file that when mounted with a passphrase is accessible like any ordinary filesystem. I have even found that I can run MPEG movies off a PGPDisks with no loss in playback quality on my laptop which has a 450 MHz Pentium III.
Finally read the Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems for significant discussions on privacy issues. It is available as comp.risks on the Usenet News and on the web at http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/.
Do you think Microsoft takes care to protect your privacy when designing its products? Guess again.
For example, you could have a web browser, email client and streaming audio show going on at the same time in most OSes.
But in the BeOS, all of these different programs could be individually making audio and they'd be mixed together.
It happened that the test I did sounded really cool. If they were all at high volume there was a cacophonous roar. At low volume it sounded like a crowded subway station, and as you varied the volume of each song it would be as if you were walking among the crowd and approaching people carrying radios, then they'd recede.
I've tried to play sound files on windows NT while I had realaudio going, and I got a rude alert saying the device was busy. After all these years I'd spent working with the BeOS, I thought that was really lame. Isn't NT supposed to have architecture?
The fact is the human ear can pick out individual conversations from a crowded room (most people can, I can do it well even though my hearing is damaged by my fiance can't). With multiple audio streams (BeOS can do multiple video streams too) all of your programs can be making sound and you can just tune into the one you want to listen to, or raise the volume on the one you were interested in.
Even at the lowest point of Apple's difficulties, the MacOS spellswell brought in substantially more revenue than BeOS Spellswell ever did.
The core dictionary engine is the same, only the UI is different between the two products. While the Word Services protocol is different between the two platforms, they work in an analogous way.
A big difference between me and Gobe is that they had funding for marketing and I had no funding at all. The only investment I was able to make on my own was my time. The whole time I was shipping Spellswell I expected Be to get started and get serious about marketing its own product soon. That day never came.
The best thing they did for me was give the OS away for free. But at the same time they stopped development of the desktop OS and made it clear they weren't going to support desktop developers anymore. We don't even get BeOS 5 Pro for free as part of our developer program membership. They shut down the BeWare online software catalog.
Very early on Be promised to make things better for developers in the market by fashioning itself as an Internet company which would promote products online. We wouldn't have to deal with distribution channels anymore but just sell our products through BeDepot. I think that was an excellent idea but their actual execution of it was amazingly incompetent.
Rather than take advantage of my work to bring this protocol to the BeOS - it is an open protocol and allows any text service to be linked to an email client, not just spellchecking - Be instead wrote their own spellchecker for email.
The only other email client to implement Word Services on the BeOS, Mail-It from BeatWare became a free product after BeatWare abandoned the BeOS market and ported their ePicture graphics editor to Mac and Windows where it is selling very well.
If you don't think I have good reason to be pissed at Be, why don't you ask Marc Verstaen, the President of Beatware, what he thinks of Be after he and a group of investors wasted several million dollars developing desktop software for the BeOS?
There were only a few substantial commercial companies solely devoted to BeOS development and Beatware was one of the best. Now they are a Mac and Windows shop.
My monthly royalties from Spellswell just about buy dinner for me and my fiance. One dinner. In recent months it wouldn't include a bottle of wine with that dinner.
Here's why:
- They allow shell access via telnet and secure shell
- Supporting ssh allows me to use secure copy (scp) to upload content
- I can read my email via a shell login with Pine or Elm without downloading all my mail (important when one uses several operating systems)
- I can write my own CGI's in any programming language I want and install them myself. They provide the gnu development tools.
- They have excellent customer service. I've sent in questions in the middle of the night and got back authoritative answers within the hour.
- Their prices are quite reasonable - $25 a month for basic virtual domain hosting, which might seem high but you get the shell access and secure shell
Write to seagull@seagull.net if you want to ask the webmaster about colocation. That's not really their specialty but hosting is.I host these domains with them:
- www.goingware.com
- www.wordservices.org
- www.geometricvisions.com
In addition my fiance has two domains there and a friend has two domains there under my account (there's a discount for reselling the service - your first account is free but more under the same billing are cheaper).The Battle of the Bands
I was able to play nine uncompressed CD quality audio files simultaneously and independently vary the volume on each on the BeOS. I was never able to play more than one on the other operating systems I tried. I could play up to two tracks simultaneously from an ISO 9660 CD before the seek time of the head broke up the sound.
I've found in the 2.4.0-test1-acX kernels that audio streams will just plain stop until I click on or drag around an XWindow. Posts I've seen on the Linux kernel mailing list suggest that X is failing to yield the PCI bus at times.
I'm not suggesting though that you should all go use BeOS for your sound. What I do suggest is improving the multimedia architecture of Linux until it can match the BeOS.
I am one of the few developers to actually ship a commercial application, Spellswell from Working Software. I've kept Spellswell actively maintained over a couple of years, it is now at version 1.0.5.
So I didn't appreciate it when Be announced it was dropping active support for the desktop and "refocusing" on Internet Appliances.
Now promoting the system for Internet appliances is fine, but Be had spent years promoting its system as a platform for multimedia content creation, and in my view it is the best platform for desktop software. Check out, for instance, Gobe Software's Gobe Productive, one of the best integrated applications available.
While Be still has a desktop operating system and gives it away for free, it has made it clear that there will be no further desktop-specific development for the operating system; if a feature or bug-fix makes it into the system it will be because it is needed for Internet Appliances, and not because it is needed for the desktop.
I repeatedly tried to bring this failure to live up to its commitments on bedevtalk and beusertalk and while other professional developers supported my position, I was constantly shot down by the hobbyists and Be's own employees.
Finally I tried to point out the error of their ways in some detail by posting this to bedevtalk:
Some of Use Work For a Living
in which I pointed out that the appropriate response to criticism from developers like me would be for Be employees who subscribe to the list to communicate our concerns to senior management.
How did Be respond?
Tom Maddox, listmaster@be.com, unsubscribed me and asked the list if they'd prefer to have the entire list moderated.
Before you decide to devote time and energy to developing BeOS software, I ask you to consider whether you wish to take the risk to invest your time and money in a system that is only available from a company that has not only proved it cannot keep its commitments, it has stated repeatedly it does not want its dishonesty pointed out to it and will actively work to censor those who would work to correct its behaviour.
One of the reasons I am working to reorient my consulting business to take primarily Linux work is that I feel it is a mistake for any third party software developer to depend on any API, particularly an operating system, that they do not have the source code to.
If you feel you must support a closed-source operating system or API, I urge you to require the API vendor to sign a contract guaranteeing they will support the API forever - both in terms of maintainence and marketing - or else they will reimburse you for your lost revenue and opportunity cost if they fail to live up to their commitments.
I had much the same experience with Apple Computer which is why I became a BeOS developer.
BTW - My fiance told me that being unsubscribed from bedevtalk is like being kicked off the design committee for the Edsel. It's a beautiful OS and the engineering quality is excellent, but the sales prevention team there, uh, I mean the management, is determined to do everything they can to prevent the business from succeeding.
Perhaps Internet Appliances are a good idea, but after the galling lack of marketing cluefulness shown when they were on the desktop I seriously doubt they can get it together to succeed in the Internet Appliance arena either.
If you are an Internet Appliance manufacturer, think about whether you want to make your livelihood dependent on a company with a proven track record of failing to live up to its commitments. Consider that in many was QNX is a better OS for appliance and you can get a developer kit for free.
I don't think Linux is a very good platform either for the desktop or Internet Appliances but because it is free software that problem is capable of being addressed.