The fact is that RedHat is easier to install and easier to administer than Debian for the average user.
Debian is hard to install.
But its administration is tops among linuxes. It is built almost entirely by volunteer system administrators. It is the only linux trivial to upgrade from one distribution to the next.
"New Material Response to Touch Pressure". Yeah, it's called piezoelectric materials, and they were discovered during the time that Plato and those cool Romans were out sprinking their food with lead to get a buzz.
Piezoelectics are brittle, but more importantly they are displacement sensors with a range that extends sometimes up to a mm. They also yield high voltage low current signals.
The cloth described changes conductance with material strain. This allows a much broader range of sensitivity, and a much wider variety of uses. For example, why aren't piezoelectrics used in keyboards ?? The answer is cost. It costs to have high voltage circuitry, and the cost of just a few keys would be more than a current keyboards is worth.
The potential for consumer applications is enormous, ranging from sensing body position to interfaces like keyboards.
2) Macromedia patent 1 allows you to interactively edit defining elements of a graphic, and have the graphics automatically update (1991 filing date)
3) Macromedia patent 2 is on displaying multiple sound waveforms and allowing you to interactively edit and mix them (no, it really is almost this broad). (1988 filing date)
4) Macromedia patent 3 allows one to display a single waveform and change parameters of the waveform. (1992 filing date)
That is all OK, we will be free and clear of these patents in the year 2010 or so. It seems like Europe is going to have a substantial advantage in software generation, since the European countries don't allow stupid tripe like these patents.
I have a question. Does it really matter if they watch you? There are laws covering what they can and cannot use as evidence against you. If they had a folder of you doing subversive freaky things....so what? They can't use it unless they had a reason to suspect you in the first place.
Yes, it really matters. Matter of fact, it is a constitutional right in the US to be secure in your person and possessions against unreasonable search and seizure. That is right - secure by default is the law. It is not ease of law enforcement by default.
This is an essential liberty. It threatens free speech. It threatens many essential liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin, 1759
Basically, the web server uses a kernel module for some tasks, and userspace for others. The TCP/IP stack in 2.4 kernels is very parallelized compared to 2.2 and earlier kernels. There are a few other key fixes as well. According to the articles, the server was to be released, GPLd, and folded into Apache as time and hacking efforts permits. Presumably that is not happening yet...
The more time I use linux, the better Debian looks...
I don't care, who are the/.ers that use IE5.5 anyway? Don't they know this is Linux country;-)
Back in the day, Hemos and Taco tracked web browsers visiting/. It was mostly IE. And if you've spent any time moderating, you know that anti-M$ comments are not modded well. Certainly this site has a pro-linux slant compared to most, but that comes from its editors and not from its readership. The readership is mostly using IE5.5.
Not listing an inventor on a patent is grounds for invalidating a patent. It could very well be the case that they legally have to have you sign the patent. In one sense, you have them over a barrel.
OTOH, getting a patent is usually a good thing - it boosts the resume, and can lead to royalties.
Since this is a former employer, you might point out that you need to give the patent office all known prior art, and that reviewing the patent and collecting the art would be things you would be PAID to do if you still worked there. Basically, you need to establish a contract you find acceptable to you in order for you to do your job as an inventor, This may be a royalty based contract, or a per time consulting contract, or you could just work for free - depending on how you feel about your time and this idea.
I wouldn't worry about the breadth of the patent - I guarantee there are scores of succcessful patents broader. It is quite common for the patent to be initially refused and then redrafted to be more focussed. In fact, if I were looking over the patent, I would look at ways it could be even broader. A classic example
The Cohen Boyer patent established the ability to inject a gene vector into a cell and induce that cell to make a protein. Initially it was written for prokaryotes only. A one sentence add-on made it valuable for eukaryotes as well - and that dramatically increased the patent value.
Yes, mozilla really is constructed to "do the right thing".
A web browser should be constructed to benefit the user. Mozilla allows you to selectively block ads from sites without prompting you over and over again. It also allows the same flexibility in dealing with cookies.
There is absolutely no reason whatsoever that every web browser shouldn't have this simple capability built in. Except that the consumer has not demanded it, and there seems to be a bit of a monopoly on Windoze/Mac web browsers.
RSA is just securing a little good PR on the back end of their patent.
What they hope to do is further establish their namebrand as the standard in encryption technology.
Of course, now openssh/openssl will get wrapped in so many open source projects it will get silly fast. For example, I bet it takes about 1 day for Mozilla to incorporate openssl in its default build.
This move marks a large step forward for open source secure products.
The CueCat reverse engineering is remarkably similar to this, except much more simple. The hackers merely had to figure out what the output meant, which apparently was pretty easy. They treated the CueCat as a black box, recording the output from the scanner and figuring out what it meant. No harm, no foul.
Copyright NEVER protects against reverse engineering. Only patenting does. And patenting also protects against clean room implementations. You cannot use the invention specified in the patent to accomplish the patent's claims, and ignorance is no excuse. You can make a clean room implementation and hope that it doesn't use the same methods to accomplish the same goal. If it
does use the same methods to accomplish the same claims, you are in violation.
I think in this case the intellectual property is probably copyrighted, and they are screwed.
Apple is setting the standard and always has. Did anybody notice how important 'transparency' has become since apple demoed Mac OS X?
Actually, the Enlightenment window manager has used transparency for some time, as has Eterm, whose functionality was duplicated in gnome-terminal. I suspect there are others, as well. Apple would be quite dumb if they hadn't stolen most of their ideas from others. TrueType text, as a further example, is largely a subset of Metafont from TeX, with some differences in the mathematical complexity required to draw characters.
If anyone has been setting a standard, it is the Redmond company running 90 percent of the world's desktop boxes.
The competitive desktop efforts of linux are exactly why they will become much stronger than Mac or Windows. If you have a Mac or Windows and you want a new desktop you need a new OS or a new computer.
If you have linux and you want a new desktop you need only change the pulldown menu in XDM. This creates an unprecedented ability on the part of the consumer to change his desktop. This creates competition without barriers, and that will only result in much stronger product lines. Besides, we can already see that human interface designers from Windows and Mac worlds are working on various aspects of GNOME and KDE.
With competition, we all win. It may not occur now or even in 6 more months, but it is coming, and it won't be too long.
It's clear that Transmeta began as an academic exercise in exploring a new kind of computer chip that converted the instructions on the fly.
No. That is not really it. Hardware designers knew that there were lots of things with significant advantages over x86 instruction sets. The downside is that the dominant piece of software runs on x86, and that is not going to change anytime soon. Also, x86 is really inefficient in power consumption.
Therefore, the appropriate compensation is software recoding of x86 into a more modern and efficient instruction set. As a bonus the power consumption is really low for the resulting speed.
Did it work ? Only another year will tell. It has certainly made Intel/AMD sit up and take notice that for laptops at least - they were dropping the ball. The 2 hour laptop to run Windoze is inadequate. When I am on the road giving talks and such I want all day performance. Transmeta will provide the CPU end that suits that goal. Of course, a laptop is more than just a CPU, but 1-2 years ago Intel/AMD cpus got hot enough to fry eggs on.
People are happy to argue that Mac laptops already suit this goal - but they cannot run Windoze and thus are marginalized before they begin.
Microsoft has no interest or motivation to port Windoze to other architectures - they suck badly enough trying to keep it running on one. (Don't argue to me about Alpha Windoze - I've used it - and I predict McKinley Windoze will suck badly enough to keep people on 32bit x86 machines indefinitely.)
There is work on this topic going back to the turn of the century by David Katz in Sweden. He used to claim that roughness had form components for rougher surfaces, and was dominated by vibration for smoother surfaces.
More recent studies have focussed on surfaces about as rough as 400 grit sandpaper or rougher. This would correspond to Katz' form region of roughness. It is quite clear that vibration has absolutely nothing to do with roughness perception in this regime. It is purely spatial, and nearly 100% based on the firing of mechanoreceptors sensitive to pressure on the skin. Do a Medline search on my name to find out more.
There is some doubt about roughness over finer surfaces, as the models have not been adequately tested yet. But psychophysical studies consistently find roughness to be purely spatial, and some studies even adapt the skin to vibration to determine if there is "cross talk" between vibration senses and roughness. Indeed, any such crosstalk is minimal.
The point I am making is that taking a three dimensional surface and exploring it with your finger is dramatically different from receiving a one dimensional interpretation of the surface through vibration. And I only refer to roughness, which is only one dimension of the textural components of an object. There is also hardness/softness, temperature, not to mention actual three dimensional conformation.
And in fact this mouse is not even translating surface texturet to vibration. It is increasing force feedback to correspond to roughness in some sense. It will be tougher to push the mouse over sandpaper than glass.
The tactile senses are not dominated by vibratory inputs. Indeed, the dominant component of texture is roughness, and it is purely spatial. Being able to mimic the surface texture, or even the surface roughness, would be extremely useful.
As far as force feedback, I generally think of it as quite a bit less useful than touch. You can numb the fingertips experimentally to demonstrate the really crude sorts of movements that are available with proprioceptive feedback but not cutaneous feedback.
This mouse is a cool step in the proper direction - but is VERY crude in simulation of actual touch.
Is it *REALLY* Microsofts fault, and should they *REALLY* call this a vulnerability, when the admin KNOWINGLY leaves a system account with a blank password exposed to the Internet in all its glory?
Repeat after me. Installations should be secure by default, insecure due to administrator action. The converse is NOT true.
So now, for penance, I suggest you go to OpenBSD and catch a clue on creating systems with security appropriate for being placed open on the net.
This is one area where mozilla has it done properly. Mozilla allows you to accept or reject cookies on a domain name by domain name basis, and remember the decisions.
I use a very simple criteria. If the cookie will do me substantial good, I will accept it. Thus I accept cookies for sites with passwords and logins, and customizable content. I never accept cookies for advertisements like doubleclick.
The beauty of it shows up in the remembering sites part. I only need to refuse a doubleclick ad once. Then it is bit-bucketed forever.
Your browser should do things that are in your best interest, such as the way mozilla handles cookies.
This is really it. The major corporate players are now USING open source to achieve that which their business models could not.
They are using it to break the Office monopoly. They want to be able, in a year's time, to go to a CTO and sell them on linux, GNOME, and StarOffice. With players like Sun, HP, and Dell, and the bottom line (the price), this strategy will work.
Once StarOffice makes inroads in Office Suites against MS Office, Microsoft will be forced to compete on quality and service with a free adversary that already kicks Microsoft's butt in service. Make no mistake about it. IF StarOffice meets corporate expectations, it will rapidly grow in its user base. As will linux as a desktop OS.
The open source model will have broken a very strong monopoly being maintained by anticompetitive tactics.
Expect lots and lots of FUD coming out of Redmond. This threatens their living more than the antitrust suit.
It is easy to develop for. Programming tools exist. It is free. A company could quite easily pay a few programmers for a month or two and have a complete suite of applications for a palmtop. That is not a lot of investment for Compaq to make to make their PDA free of licensing issues from Redmond.
The idea here is that the makers of the PDA can allow the PDA owner to actually own the software, instead of entering a licensing agreement with Microsoft. That frees the PDA company of licensing fees and makes the PDA cheaper. And it all comes for a relatively small investment in programming time. After all, the OS and the windowing system are free.
It is not really about superiority of OS. It is about freedom to the consumer and the hardware maker.
A method for displaying on a computer screen multiple sets of information needed on a recurring basis, comprising the steps of: (1) Establishing an area on the computer screen in which the multiple sets of information are to be displayed, the established area having a maximum size which is substantially less than the entire area of the screen. (2) Providing within the established area a plurality of selection indicators, one for each of the multiple sets of information. (3) Selecting one of the multiple sets of information for display within the established area by pointing to one of the selection indicators within the established area, whereby the selected set of information will be substituted within the established area for the set of information previously being displayed therein. A selected set of information may also be moved out of the selected area by pointing to its selection indicator and dragging it away.
So? Doesn't everybody use the fonts from some old windows cd for their X server anyway?
Windows fonts are TrueType fonts. True Type font technology, while largely being a subset of metafont technology, is patented by Apple, and it is possible (although it currently seems unlikely) that Apple will call those patents into action.
You can, however, convert True Type fonts into very large Type1 fonts with the ttf2pt1 package. Then they can be used by ghostscript (provided you place them in a font directory, use type1inst and mkfontdir, and edit your gs Fontmap). They can also be used by X if you rebuild the X font loader (it chokes on large fonts without a rebuild - instructions on the ttf2pt1 web site). Of course this still doesn't get you antialiasing, but it does get you some really nice fonts. And that is a large part of the problem with fonts under X. And we know that everyone loves building X and has several hundred megs just waiting for the X source code.
X also now comes with Freetype font rasterizer, so native TrueType fonts can be used. There is really no sign of Apple pulling the plug on it yet, but they can do this whenever they like. Don't forget Apple and Windows dominate TrueType font usage, and presumably Microsoft is paying a lot of money to use the patented technology.
Why not set X up to use TeX fonts? That should be possible; everything's open that needs to be open...
I've done that. Which fonts would you like to use, and for what purpose ??
It is pretty easy to take tools like mkfontdir and type1inst and take the available Type1 versions of the TeX fonts, add them to your X fontpath (xset +fp ~/fonts/), and use them in whatever.
I personally like the cmtex series for fixed width terminal fonts. Of course, the font rasterizer is also a large problem (or rather, its lack of antialiasing and alpha blending).
Well, there is a long history of copyright law in the US. Its initial intent comes from the US Constitution.
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
This was initially interpreted fairly narrowly, and the time of copyright monopoly was comparably short. In the last 100 years, the copyright monopoly period has been extended and extended, primarily on the behalf of large corporations like Disney (who wants to continue monopolizing original Mickey Mouse films).
The original intent of copyright law - to PROMOTE the release of material for eventual public domain status - has been corrupted. Copyrights no longer expire. Technically they do expire, but copyright law has been extending copyright periods faster than they can expire. Thus, the copyrights no longer pass into the public domain at all.
The digital technology can change all of that. Copyright holders of a medium amenable to digitization, such as movies and music, are scared. Previously, I could copy a CD to a tape and give it to my brother. These actions are essentially unprosecutable and unpreventable in a society with some privacy rights.
Now, in a digital age, I can rip a CD and email it to my brother. This action is also unprosecutable and unpreventable (assume I use PGP on the email). This underscores the movement of a digital copyright into public domain. It is unstoppable on technical grounds.
Napster and Gnutella facilitate the same actions - but on a much broader level. So they raise the issue - how does copyright law apply ??? And how should it apply ??
A bigger issue still is the record companies. They provide almost no digital internet distribution even though there is a market of more than 20 million consumers. How scared must they be of digital distribution to do that ??
They will eventually adopt a small pay per download market. They have to. It will largely calm down the napster commerce. And napster/gnutella can still be used on uncopyrighed materials like concert tapes, or copyrighted and approved materials like band demo songs.
Fundamentally, sharing music or moveies with one's neighbor is not something you ought to be prosecuted for.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact is that RedHat is easier to install and easier to administer than Debian for the average user.
Debian is hard to install.
But its administration is tops among linuxes. It is built almost entirely by volunteer system administrators. It is the only linux trivial to upgrade from one distribution to the next.
"New Material Response to Touch Pressure". Yeah, it's called piezoelectric materials, and they were discovered during the time that Plato and those cool Romans were out sprinking their food with lead to get a buzz.
Piezoelectics are brittle, but more importantly they are displacement sensors with a range that extends sometimes up to a mm. They also yield high voltage low current signals.
The cloth described changes conductance with material strain. This allows a much broader range of sensitivity, and a much wider variety of uses. For example, why aren't piezoelectrics used in keyboards ?? The answer is cost. It costs to have high voltage circuitry, and the cost of just a few keys would be more than a current keyboards is worth.
The potential for consumer applications is enormous, ranging from sensing body position to interfaces like keyboards.
1) Adobe's patent is on floating tabbed widgets
2) Macromedia patent 1 allows you to interactively edit defining elements of a graphic, and have the graphics automatically update (1991 filing date)
3) Macromedia patent 2 is on displaying multiple sound waveforms and allowing you to interactively edit and mix them (no, it really is almost this broad). (1988 filing date)
4) Macromedia patent 3 allows one to display a single waveform and change parameters of the waveform. (1992 filing date)
That is all OK, we will be free and clear of these patents in the year 2010 or so. It seems like Europe is going to have a substantial advantage in software generation, since the European countries don't allow stupid tripe like these patents.
I have a question. Does it really matter if they watch you? There are laws covering what they can and cannot use as evidence against you. If they had a folder of you doing subversive freaky things....so what? They can't use it unless they had a reason to suspect you in the first place.
Yes, it really matters. Matter of fact, it is a constitutional right in the US to be secure in your person and possessions against unreasonable search and seizure. That is right - secure by default is the law. It is not ease of law enforcement by default.
This is an essential liberty. It threatens free speech. It threatens many essential liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin, 1759
What is the deal with this new web server Red Hat is working on? It is supposed to be part of the kernel.
Ingo Molnar was working on it. See this interview with Ingo or this article about the results.
Basically, the web server uses a kernel module for some tasks, and userspace for others. The TCP/IP stack in 2.4 kernels is very parallelized compared to 2.2 and earlier kernels. There are a few other key fixes as well. According to the articles, the server was to be released, GPLd, and folded into Apache as time and hacking efforts permits. Presumably that is not happening yet...
The more time I use linux, the better Debian looks...
I don't care, who are the /.ers that use IE5.5 anyway? Don't they know this is Linux country ;-)
/. It was mostly IE. And if you've spent any time moderating, you know that anti-M$ comments are not modded well. Certainly this site has a pro-linux slant compared to most, but that comes from its editors and not from its readership. The readership is mostly using IE5.5.
Back in the day, Hemos and Taco tracked web browsers visiting
Not listing an inventor on a patent is grounds for invalidating a patent. It could very well be the case that they legally have to have you sign the patent. In one sense, you have them over a barrel.
OTOH, getting a patent is usually a good thing - it boosts the resume, and can lead to royalties.
Since this is a former employer, you might point out that you need to give the patent office all known prior art, and that reviewing the patent and collecting the art would be things you would be PAID to do if you still worked there. Basically, you need to establish a contract you find acceptable to you in order for you to do your job as an inventor, This may be a royalty based contract, or a per time consulting contract, or you could just work for free - depending on how you feel about your time and this idea.
I wouldn't worry about the breadth of the patent - I guarantee there are scores of succcessful patents broader. It is quite common for the patent to be initially refused and then redrafted to be more focussed. In fact, if I were looking over the patent, I would look at ways it could be even broader. A classic example
The Cohen Boyer patent established the ability to inject a gene vector into a cell and induce that cell to make a protein. Initially it was written for prokaryotes only. A one sentence add-on made it valuable for eukaryotes as well - and that dramatically increased the patent value.
Yes, mozilla really is constructed to "do the right thing".
A web browser should be constructed to benefit the user. Mozilla allows you to selectively block ads from sites without prompting you over and over again. It also allows the same flexibility in dealing with cookies.
There is absolutely no reason whatsoever that every web browser shouldn't have this simple capability built in. Except that the consumer has not demanded it, and there seems to be a bit of a monopoly on Windoze/Mac web browsers.
RSA is just securing a little good PR on the back end of their patent.
What they hope to do is further establish their namebrand as the standard in encryption technology.
Of course, now openssh/openssl will get wrapped in so many open source projects it will get silly fast. For example, I bet it takes about 1 day for Mozilla to incorporate openssl in its default build.
This move marks a large step forward for open source secure products.
The CueCat reverse engineering is remarkably similar to this, except much more simple. The hackers merely had to figure out what the output meant, which apparently was pretty easy. They treated the CueCat as a black box, recording the output from the scanner and figuring out what it meant. No harm, no foul.
Copyright NEVER protects against reverse engineering. Only patenting does. And patenting also protects against clean room implementations. You cannot use the invention specified in the patent to accomplish the patent's claims, and ignorance is no excuse. You can make a clean room implementation and hope that it doesn't use the same methods to accomplish the same goal. If it
does use the same methods to accomplish the same claims, you are in violation.
I think in this case the intellectual property is probably copyrighted, and they are screwed.
You do know that Apple invented pull-down menus, right?
Another idea stolen from others - at Xerox Parc. Along with the mouse, and the GUI.
Apple has made some real innovations of its own, but mostly they, like Microsoft, like linux, like other Unices, use ideas taken from elsewhere.
Apple is setting the standard and always has. Did anybody notice how important 'transparency' has become since apple demoed Mac OS X?
Actually, the Enlightenment window manager has used transparency for some time, as has Eterm, whose functionality was duplicated in gnome-terminal. I suspect there are others, as well. Apple would be quite dumb if they hadn't stolen most of their ideas from others. TrueType text, as a further example, is largely a subset of Metafont from TeX, with some differences in the mathematical complexity required to draw characters.
If anyone has been setting a standard, it is the Redmond company running 90 percent of the world's desktop boxes.
The competitive desktop efforts of linux are exactly why they will become much stronger than Mac or Windows. If you have a Mac or Windows and you want a new desktop you need a new OS or a new computer.
If you have linux and you want a new desktop you need only change the pulldown menu in XDM. This creates an unprecedented ability on the part of the consumer to change his desktop. This creates competition without barriers, and that will only result in much stronger product lines. Besides, we can already see that human interface designers from Windows and Mac worlds are working on various aspects of GNOME and KDE.
With competition, we all win. It may not occur now or even in 6 more months, but it is coming, and it won't be too long.
It's clear that Transmeta began as an academic exercise in exploring a new kind of computer chip that converted the instructions on the fly.
No. That is not really it. Hardware designers knew that there were lots of things with significant advantages over x86 instruction sets. The downside is that the dominant piece of software runs on x86, and that is not going to change anytime soon. Also, x86 is really inefficient in power consumption.
Therefore, the appropriate compensation is software recoding of x86 into a more modern and efficient instruction set. As a bonus the power consumption is really low for the resulting speed.
Did it work ? Only another year will tell. It has certainly made Intel/AMD sit up and take notice that for laptops at least - they were dropping the ball. The 2 hour laptop to run Windoze is inadequate. When I am on the road giving talks and such I want all day performance. Transmeta will provide the CPU end that suits that goal. Of course, a laptop is more than just a CPU, but 1-2 years ago Intel/AMD cpus got hot enough to fry eggs on.
People are happy to argue that Mac laptops already suit this goal - but they cannot run Windoze and thus are marginalized before they begin.
Microsoft has no interest or motivation to port Windoze to other architectures - they suck badly enough trying to keep it running on one. (Don't argue to me about Alpha Windoze - I've used it - and I predict McKinley Windoze will suck badly enough to keep people on 32bit x86 machines indefinitely.)
There is work on this topic going back to the turn of the century by David Katz in Sweden. He used to claim that roughness had form components for rougher surfaces, and was dominated by vibration for smoother surfaces.
More recent studies have focussed on surfaces about as rough as 400 grit sandpaper or rougher. This would correspond to Katz' form region of roughness. It is quite clear that vibration has absolutely nothing to do with roughness perception in this regime. It is purely spatial, and nearly 100% based on the firing of mechanoreceptors sensitive to pressure on the skin. Do a Medline search on my name to find out more.
There is some doubt about roughness over finer surfaces, as the models have not been adequately tested yet. But psychophysical studies consistently find roughness to be purely spatial, and some studies even adapt the skin to vibration to determine if there is "cross talk" between vibration senses and roughness. Indeed, any such crosstalk is minimal.
The point I am making is that taking a three dimensional surface and exploring it with your finger is dramatically different from receiving a one dimensional interpretation of the surface through vibration. And I only refer to roughness, which is only one dimension of the textural components of an object. There is also hardness/softness, temperature, not to mention actual three dimensional conformation.
And in fact this mouse is not even translating surface texturet to vibration. It is increasing force feedback to correspond to roughness in some sense. It will be tougher to push the mouse over sandpaper than glass.
The tactile senses are not dominated by vibratory inputs. Indeed, the dominant component of texture is roughness, and it is purely spatial. Being able to mimic the surface texture, or even the surface roughness, would be extremely useful.
As far as force feedback, I generally think of it as quite a bit less useful than touch. You can numb the fingertips experimentally to demonstrate the really crude sorts of movements that are available with proprioceptive feedback but not cutaneous feedback.
This mouse is a cool step in the proper direction - but is VERY crude in simulation of actual touch.
Is it *REALLY* Microsofts fault, and should they *REALLY* call this a vulnerability, when the admin KNOWINGLY leaves a system account with a blank password exposed to the Internet in all its glory?
Repeat after me. Installations should be secure by default, insecure due to administrator action. The converse is NOT true.
So now, for penance, I suggest you go to OpenBSD and catch a clue on creating systems with security appropriate for being placed open on the net.
This is one area where mozilla has it done properly. Mozilla allows you to accept or reject cookies on a domain name by domain name basis, and remember the decisions.
I use a very simple criteria. If the cookie will do me substantial good, I will accept it. Thus I accept cookies for sites with passwords and logins, and customizable content. I never accept cookies for advertisements like doubleclick.
The beauty of it shows up in the remembering sites part. I only need to refuse a doubleclick ad once. Then it is bit-bucketed forever.
Your browser should do things that are in your best interest, such as the way mozilla handles cookies.
Does yours ?!
This is really it. The major corporate players are now USING open source to achieve that which their business models could not.
They are using it to break the Office monopoly. They want to be able, in a year's time, to go to a CTO and sell them on linux, GNOME, and StarOffice. With players like Sun, HP, and Dell, and the bottom line (the price), this strategy will work.
Once StarOffice makes inroads in Office Suites against MS Office, Microsoft will be forced to compete on quality and service with a free adversary that already kicks Microsoft's butt in service. Make no mistake about it. IF StarOffice meets corporate expectations, it will rapidly grow in its user base. As will linux as a desktop OS.
The open source model will have broken a very strong monopoly being maintained by anticompetitive tactics.
Expect lots and lots of FUD coming out of Redmond. This threatens their living more than the antitrust suit.
Linux on a palmtop makes a lot of sense.
It is easy to develop for. Programming tools exist. It is free. A company could quite easily pay a few programmers for a month or two and have a complete suite of applications for a palmtop. That is not a lot of investment for Compaq to make to make their PDA free of licensing issues from Redmond.
The idea here is that the makers of the PDA can allow the PDA owner to actually own the software, instead of entering a licensing agreement with Microsoft. That frees the PDA company of licensing fees and makes the PDA cheaper. And it all comes for a relatively small investment in programming time. After all, the OS and the windowing system are free.
It is not really about superiority of OS. It is about freedom to the consumer and the hardware maker.
A method for displaying on a computer screen multiple sets of information needed on a recurring basis, comprising the steps of: (1) Establishing an area on the computer screen in which the multiple sets of information are to be displayed, the established area having a maximum size which is substantially less than the entire area of the screen. (2) Providing within the established area a plurality of selection indicators, one for each of the multiple sets of information. (3) Selecting one of the multiple sets of information for display within the established area by pointing to one of the selection indicators within the established area, whereby the selected set of information will be substituted within the established area for the set of information previously being displayed therein. A selected set of information may also be moved out of the selected area by pointing to its selection indicator and dragging it away.
But the real KICKER is
Issued/Filed dates:Aug. 13, 1996 / June 23, 1994
So? Doesn't everybody use the fonts from some old windows cd for their X server anyway?
Windows fonts are TrueType fonts. True Type font technology, while largely being a subset of metafont technology, is patented by Apple, and it is possible (although it currently seems unlikely) that Apple will call those patents into action.
You can, however, convert True Type fonts into very large Type1 fonts with the ttf2pt1 package. Then they can be used by ghostscript (provided you place them in a font directory, use type1inst and mkfontdir, and edit your gs Fontmap). They can also be used by X if you rebuild the X font loader (it chokes on large fonts without a rebuild - instructions on the ttf2pt1 web site). Of course this still doesn't get you antialiasing, but it does get you some really nice fonts. And that is a large part of the problem with fonts under X. And we know that everyone loves building X and has several hundred megs just waiting for the X source code.
X also now comes with Freetype font rasterizer, so native TrueType fonts can be used. There is really no sign of Apple pulling the plug on it yet, but they can do this whenever they like. Don't forget Apple and Windows dominate TrueType font usage, and presumably Microsoft is paying a lot of money to use the patented technology.
Why not set X up to use TeX fonts? That should be possible; everything's open that needs to be open...
I've done that. Which fonts would you like to use, and for what purpose ??
It is pretty easy to take tools like mkfontdir and type1inst and take the available Type1 versions of the TeX fonts, add them to your X fontpath (xset +fp ~/fonts/), and use them in whatever.
I personally like the cmtex series for fixed width terminal fonts. Of course, the font rasterizer is also a large problem (or rather, its lack of antialiasing and alpha blending).
now text in X can look as pretty as in windows.
Windows does not alpha blend text. Mac does not alpha blend text.
Antialiasing without alpha blending is substantially worse than with alpha blending.
Windows has great fonts. Great fonts are bought, and hardly ever given freely (a few notable exceptions occur in the case of TeX).
Alpha blending and antialiasing will help X font looks quite a bit. But good fonts help a lot too. And Microsoft has bought a lot of good fonts.
This is a no brainer.
A Java based exploit can turn netscape browser into a server.
That oughta last about 3 seconds until Java locks up the netscape process.
Most Windows people have no idea how pathetically unstable Java for linux is.
Well, there is a long history of copyright law in the US. Its initial intent comes from the US Constitution.
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
This was initially interpreted fairly narrowly, and the time of copyright monopoly was comparably short. In the last 100 years, the copyright monopoly period has been extended and extended, primarily on the behalf of large corporations like Disney (who wants to continue monopolizing original Mickey Mouse films).
The original intent of copyright law - to PROMOTE the release of material for eventual public domain status - has been corrupted. Copyrights no longer expire. Technically they do expire, but copyright law has been extending copyright periods faster than they can expire. Thus, the copyrights no longer pass into the public domain at all.
The digital technology can change all of that. Copyright holders of a medium amenable to digitization, such as movies and music, are scared. Previously, I could copy a CD to a tape and give it to my brother. These actions are essentially unprosecutable and unpreventable in a society with some privacy rights.
Now, in a digital age, I can rip a CD and email it to my brother. This action is also unprosecutable and unpreventable (assume I use PGP on the email). This underscores the movement of a digital copyright into public domain. It is unstoppable on technical grounds.
Napster and Gnutella facilitate the same actions - but on a much broader level. So they raise the issue - how does copyright law apply ??? And how should it apply ??
A bigger issue still is the record companies. They provide almost no digital internet distribution even though there is a market of more than 20 million consumers. How scared must they be of digital distribution to do that ??
They will eventually adopt a small pay per download market. They have to. It will largely calm down the napster commerce. And napster/gnutella can still be used on uncopyrighed materials like concert tapes, or copyrighted and approved materials like band demo songs.
Fundamentally, sharing music or moveies with one's neighbor is not something you ought to be prosecuted for.