Jared’s Blog

Wow, now this is an interesting read; plus, it has lots of pictures for those of us who don’t like to read! It is basically a history of how GUIs evolved over time. But, I like the paragraph at the end:

I am also not listing each version of a GUI system unless a significant change has occurred in it. MacOS has kept the same basic user interface since Version 1 and is therefore only mentioned a couple of times. Microsoft, on the other hand thinks it is fun to make users learn a completely new interface every few years, so each of the Windows interfaces is listed. (Except for Windows ME which looked just like Windows 98 and 2000).[Emphasis Mine]

Have fun reading it…

PS– I’ve found a copy of Apple’s Rhapsody DR2 OS for x86. If you don’t already know what that is, think of a Unix OS, with a Mac OS Classic Style GUI, running on an Intel-compatible CPU (boy that’s a mouthful). So, I’ll be having fun with that in my free copy of Microsoft VirtualPC (compliments of the MSDN Academic Alliance program).

Well, it seems that Mac has finally started shipping out their Intel-based Developer machines that come with an x86 version of Mac OS X Tiger. Although, initial reports are that attempting to install it on a plain ‘ole Dell box was quickly terminated. I’ll give the social engineers 1 week before they have it hacked to the point that they can install it on just about any white box you that has an x86 chip. At the very least they will know what sort of copy protection is keeping it on Apple-only boxes.

More info on this situation, including some not-so-revealing photos, at ThinkSecret.

Well, I installed Fedora Core 4 on my main Linux server at the house and one of the first things that struck me was the very ugly toolbar icons in Firefox 1.0.4. Maybe I’m too picky, but I think they should have at least given me the choice on a new theme. I, for one, happen to like the default toolbar icons that come with all the non-Fedora versions of Firefox. They have a certain simplicity about them. And the nerve of the person who changed the theme, and then went on to claim that it’s the “Firefox (default) 2.0″ theme!

Don’t get me wrong; there are several other things in FC4 that I liked very much. They have made a lot of small improvements to the user interface. But, alas, it’s not much different than my apt-updated version of FC3. There is one interesting change that is worth noting. It has to do with the xscreensavers package. Apparently, others noticed some of the more inappropriate screen savers that were included with previous versions of Fedora. Of the most prominent were “Web Colloege” and “Barcode.” Web Colloege is a pretty simple screensaver: it pulls images off the internet at random and plasters them on the screen. Just think about that for a moment, and you’ll realize why this might be a problem. Barcode has it’s own randomness, as it pulls words out of a dictionary file at random and prints them on the screen in a barcode font (as well as in readable text).

Anyway, back to the Firefox theming issue, there is a Bugzilla Report that has an overview of the problem. I’ve also posted a copy of the default theme for Firefox in that bug report, so that you can have the real default theme back, if you so desire.

According to this article over at Betanews, IBM is creating a new program called Community Source that allows opensource collaboration in developing key IBM software components. Think of it as IBM’s version of SourceForge. Now the thing I see interesting here, is that this is yet another company that has turned to the open source business model to help increase productivity and stability. Novell was one of the first big companies to try this, and I don’t think IBM will be the last. IBM has been flirting with the OSS community for some time now; maybe it’s time they start a serious relationship.

And some of the best distros are pushing out new releases like there’s no tomorrow. The two biggest are also two of the oldest: Fedora (of RedHat legacy) and Debian.

Fedora Core is in it’s fourth release and is no longer just a testing ground for RedHat Enterprise Linux, as RedHat recently turned over a lot of control to a more Community-based ‘Fedora Foundation’ (think Mozilla Foundation, only with a Linux distro). I downloaded and installed FC4 about 12 hours before it’s official release (courtesy of a torrent file I found). I found it stable, and it was missing only a few packages (nothing that couldn’t be added with APT). One thing that I noticed was that XMMS was no longer part of the default installation.

Debian just released Debian Sarge as it’s new stable branch. It has been almost 5 years since they have released a new stable release. I personally use Ubuntu, which is just a modified version of Debian Sarge. One of the best features about Sarge is it’s new installer. It takes out a whole lot of the confusion without taking away too much control (like for example, you no longer need to know the horizontal and verticle refresh rates of your monitor, only it’s max resolution, in order to configure X properly). Over all, Debian Sarge is a powerful, stable distro, and Ubuntu does a great job of making it a very user-friendly one.

OK, I just discovered this. Think of it as Google for Hackers. The wierd thing is that if you use it long enough, you’ll start to read it like normal text. Anyway, for those of you that don’t know, this style of writing is known as h4×0r (haxor).

Slashdot has a story reporting that Microsoft is releasing another 10 patches to cover 12 different security exploits. One of the exploits involves IE’s PNG support, which is hilarious seeing that IE has never supported PNG correctly anyway! I know Firefox isn’t perfect, but at least it’s not integrated into the OS to the point that it can be expoited easily (not to mention buffer overflows and the sort).