39clocks@violet.berkeley.edu (Peter Marinac) (03/13/91)
Yesterday's issue of infoworld stated that NeXT was releasing 2.1 OS to rectify a last-minute disabling of several PostScript commands in version 2.0. Seems that the commands had the ability, when mailed to another NeXT, of erasing the recipient's Mach kernal. Does anyone know if this will be the only change to 2.1. I can live without these commands, as far as I can tell, because I am not on a network and do not send PS mail. Besides, $400 in OS upgrades within two months sounds a little nutso to me |:(.
louie@sayshell.umd.edu (Louis A. Mamakos) (03/13/91)
>Yesterday's issue of infoworld stated that NeXT was releasing 2.1 >OS to rectify a last-minute disabling of several PostScript commands >in version 2.0. Seems that the commands had the ability, when >mailed to another NeXT, of erasing the recipient's Mach kernal. Yet another example of in-depth reporting from inforworld. First, I think its a pretty lame excuse to remove a capability that some of were using (that is, using the PostScript 'file' operator to open a file for writing) without offering some alternative capability. For example, rather than completely disabling opening files for writing, NeXT could have (like DEC did with their Display PostScript) restricted the directories that the file could exist in. While this is a minor inconvienience, it certainly is preferable to losing the capability entirely. As for "erasing the recpient's Mach kernel", I suspect that people don't look at SHAR archives any closer than PostScript programs, and I can mail those to people too who will unpack them without looking. I certainly hope tha this rumor is true; it means I can us the 'Distill' program once again and take advantage of Display PostScript as a platform for developing PostScript-generating applications again. Another question along this line: has there been any work in extending the concept of Public/Private window server beyond just a binary switch? It would sure be nice if you could specify a list if IP addresses, or even a hook that you plug in some authentication mechanism (like Kerberos or RSA certificates) to provide per-user access to your window server. I'd sure like to be able to write applications on other platforms that connect to the Display PostScript server on my NeXT, but that's just not possible now. louie
new@ee.udel.edu (Darren New) (03/13/91)
In article <1991Mar13.144929.25876@ni.umd.edu> louie@sayshell.umd.edu (Louis A. Mamakos) writes: >For example, rather than completely disabling opening files for >writing, NeXT could have (like DEC did with their Display PostScript) >restricted the directories that the file could exist in. While this >is a minor inconvienience, it certainly is preferable to losing the >capability entirely. I would imagine that most uses of the file operators (for writing) are not for writing, but rather for creating files. How about an option that allows writing only to files which were created by PostScript earlier in the same PostScript session. (PostScript "session" taken to mean whatever it takes to make this acceptable.) In that way, fonts and distills and so on could be written out, but it would take more work to (say) automatically munge EPS files. In any case, it would certainly prevent deleting the kernel. -- --- Darren New --- Grad Student --- CIS --- Univ. of Delaware --- ----- Network Protocols, Graphics, Programming Languages, Formal Description Techniques (esp. Estelle), Coffee, Amigas ----- =+=+=+ Let GROPE be an N-tuple where ... +=+=+=