Yeah, if you are an IT manager that lacks creativity. The smart ones setup a single workstation (or vmware session) running MS office that the email server loops stuff through when it detects a.doc file on inbound email. This workstation exports the file in a more standard file format. This way you only need one copy of MS Office for the entire company.
That same workstation will also handle docs dumped on it by other users in the office.
Actually, people mostly complain about questions that can be answered by typing the fucking question into google.
There are some Ask/. questions that COULD be good except the question is so vague lacking any detail whatsoever that there is no way the poster will get any meaningful answer. Kinda like this one. What's that old saying? Garbage in, Garbage out.
Ahh yeah, your right. I even had an applecat 212 modem. Internal, no AT command set. Ran my own "board" on it with 6 floppy drives. Sigh. Those were the days. No spam, no AOL, usenet was still viable and you could receive a full feed with a 2400bps modem.
Um, even the modern version of Deb will fit in 2G. Depends on what you install, which would be Minimal for porting a DOS app. You wouldn't need X at all.
You REALLY don't want to use such an ancient version of debian for a new project.
In DOS, you have full access to the hardware. This means that you read and write registers and I/O ports directly. Many DOS apps wrote directly to video memory for example. Most programmers did this for performance reasons, AND that it was easier.
For example: Let's say you had a form onscreen to fill out. What you did was use a ASCII screen designer tool that allowed you to play with all the attributes, and dump the contents of that to a file. This file could be included with your app (in a header file) or loaded from disk at runtime. Of course there were many other ways of doing this.
Since this guy uses a modem, he probably purchased one of the communication libraries that had x/y/zmodem, etc. and handled all the ideosyncracies of the 8250/16550 comm chips.
You also had to play lots of tricks if you wanted to access memory above 640K - you needed to run something like a DOS extender (PharLap comes to mind.)
No doubt. the lack of info in this question makes it impossible to give any meaningful answer whatsoever.
That said, I ported a rather large DOS based app to Linux a few years ago. This was one that used light-pens, touch screen, several industrial control I/O boards, network card, modem, etc. There were only 2 big issues I had.
First, I had to write custom drivers for the hardware. This really wasn't too hard actually, since I had already been directly accessing the hardware through an abstraction layer.
Second was screen I/O. Again, since I wrote everything through an abstraction layer, it really wasn't that big of an issue.
If I had NOT used abstraction, (hiding the details of the underlying hardware) it would have taken MUCH longer to port. The app was about 150K lines of code.
Modem drivers? DOS apps never had a concept of modem drivers. Neither did any other OS on the planet until "winmodems" came out. Of course Winmodems don't work in plain dos either.
While this may be a new vunerability, lack of security in Windows is not a new argument.
Frankly, the only thing that is going to wake people up is a continual barrage of REALLY nasty viruses / worms that wipes out their entire system (or at least all their important files.)
Then again, there are people SO loyal to MS that they won't leave a burning house.
Agree, but you only had one little error. In this particular flaw, you don't get a pop-up. It downloads automatically and silently. You have no idea that you have been penetrated.
Hmm. Reading the above sentance, I just KNOW some karma whore is gonna make some comment about "penetration" and "MS"... Sigh.
It's interesting, but a rather useless statistic. Go read up on what others in the security industry are saying about this study.
If you look at the DETAILS of many linux advisories, you will find that many of them have no known exploits but rather a POTENTIAL that it MAY be possible to exploit the flaw. Also, 2002 is not over yet, and we have had several REALLY nasty MS flaws come to life. Aberdeen may have to restate the results:-)
If the study looked at the severity of advisories on some sort of scale, the results would be quite different.
Note the WORDING of this press release: Open source software is now the major source of elevated security vulnerabilities for IT buyers.
Excuse me? IT buyers? What, do I BUY vunerabilities for linux now? From who, Microsoft? Anyone with a little intelligence can see right through this crap. WHen you use the word "buyers" you are dealing with marketing. PR. Spin. By the way, who paid for this study?
Anyway, what's that old saying again? There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
The problem is that larger media that could afford lawyers also have a vested interest in the DMCA being upheld. This is one of the downfalls of having most of our media controlled by only a few corporations.
Great! They can read my email! Now they will know the benefits of Herbal Viagra, how to enlarge their breasts, and be able to see hot teen cum-loving sluts!
Um, where did I say "remove XWindows"? X is fairly light. Most Window managers can be configured light as well. You don't need gnome / kde. Hell, I've done this. 8M works rather well for siple things like web browsing, email, simple word processing, etc. Yeah, your not going to be running OO (bloatware) but abiword would work fine. You must also be really young and don't realize that there was a world before Windows. People ran things like: DOS. Apple ][. C64.
The fucking point is that we are talking INDIA and other poor countries like it. It (like MANY other countries in the world) has a Very low GDP / capita. There are lots of older machines around, and people can't afford much. Hell, if they have a computer AT ALL they are lucky. The US ships lots of computer junk to china and other countries for disposal. Guess what? they don't just grind them up. They will pull out stuff that works and use them. That's if they even have electricity. It's also not gonna cost "thousands and thousands" for training. IT'S INDIA WE ARE TALKING ABOUT.
While you wouldn't want to run KDE on that system, you CAN run Linux, which is the point. The FACTS remain that you can do more with less hardware with a linux based system than you can with a Windows based system. Period.
In a quote from the article, Bill says: "We can save money in terms of speed of development or by being able to run on less expensive hardware."
So I guess that's why WinCE handhelds are less expensive than Palm pilots. Oh, wait, they aren't less expensive. Oh but then there is desktops. Oh wait, what about the $199 walmart PC running linux being less expensive than the Windows counterpart... Considering that Linux runs on just about anything, the "less expensive hardware" just is totally untrue. Let's see Windows XP run on a 386 with 8M ram. Nice FUD Bill.
If you don't shovel your sidewalk and someone slips and falls, YOU are responsible. If you don't have a fence around your pool and some kid falls in and drowns, YOU are responsible. YOU need to start taking responsability for your own crap. Yes, the script kiddies are bad, they are criminals, but YOUR behavior enables their activity when you refuse to keep your software up to date.
Your argument is like "I refuse to lock my car, and I'm gonna leave the keys in the ignition. It's not my fault if someone takes it for a joy ride, gets into a car wreck, and kills 10 people."
To imply that I would laugh at starving kids in Africa is offensive.
This is flawed. With detailed information about how the vunerability works, I as a Network Admin can filter it out in my web proxy thus protecting my users. Full disclosure is MANDATORY for security folks to be able to do their job. Remember, the black-hat's already KNOW about the bug.
Frankly, the fact that there is an exploit to reformat peoples hard drives is a GOOD thing IMHO. As a matter of fact, I hope it bites tons of people. The fact that "the average user" doesn't check for updates and maintain their machine NEEDS TO CHANGE.
The auto is a great example. If you didn't maintain your car (change the tires, fix the brakes, etc.) when it needed to be done, YOU are a danger to yourself and others around you.
People who don't maintain their machines are a big problem on the net. They are responsible for being DDOS agents, virus distributers, etc. MS (and other software vendors including open source) being slow at releasing patches is ALSO an enabler for distructive issues on the net.
Back to the article, it IS irresponsible to release exploits when the vendor hasn't had a reasonable amount of time to fix the bug and distribute the patch. There is an indjustry accepted time frame for this. If the vunerability is already well known in the wild however, keeping it a secret from the public does NO GOOD WHATSOEVER. The script kiddies keep in touch via IRC, and other mechanisms so they will know about the vunerability anyway. Not releasing the info only harms the public as they will have no chance to be prepared. Admins can add filters to their proxies for example, but they need to know details about how the exploit works in order to do so.
Keeping secrets about vunerabilities that are already known to the black-hats only harms the rest of us.
impose hefty import duties on Microsoft's below-cost exports to the EU
This would only hurt EU companies because MS has a monopoly. This is a whole different ballgame than commodity items. No, I think the EU court has a better option in the anti-trust laws. They can force MS to all sorts of things like open API's, file formats, etc.
If you look at the US market, Coke and Pepsi pretty much share the market effectivly creating a shared monopoly. Nobody else can really compete with them from a mindshare point of view. In fact, I play one off the other, as the differences between the two companies products are minimal. I just buy which ever is cheaper. Both do an equally good job of quenching my thirst. While I may PREFER coke, either works fine.
The same is NOT true in the OS market, where apps can only run on one platform (the one they were compiled for.) The Mac / Linux / etc. can't effectivly compete in the desktop market as they are not compatible.
The way MS's monopoly works (and you already KNOW this) is that you get the OS REALLY cheap on new machines, but upgrades / retail sales are EXPENSIVE. The disparity between OEM prices and retail / upgrade prices is something I personally have a problem with.
Um, the court found by examining the evidence that MS IS a monopoly, and that was upheald on appeal. Your argument is moot, and wrong, and makes for good flamebait.
Considering that your/. account has only been used in this article, it's clear that you are a troll, creating a throw away account just to incite others.
Actually, YOU don't seem to understand the basic definition of a monopoly. MS has a monopoly because the court found that there was not a viable competitor in the market - they have exclusive possesion or control of the desktop OS market.
The "abuse" of that monopoly (using monopoly power to leverage other business in a way that gives MS an unfair advantage) is the illegal part.
While I agree that "most people" don't care if MS used standards, I would bet that "most computer professionals" DO care, yet due to the monopoly issue can do very little about it. MS's failure to adhere to standards (and the embrace and extend practice) makes it REALLY flippin hard to interface MS systems to other non-MS systems.
I can see it now. Multicast the keystrokes to do a shutdown, wide open RW access to the C drive, etc.
Seriously though, this is silly. If you want remote monitors, just run remote desktop software which Would be of some use for tablet-PCs's. You take your tablet with you to a meeting and can access a spreadsheet currently open on your office machine. Now beaming from your tablet to a projector (or other tablets in the meeting) might be of some use (bluetooth would be best here), but to another desktop monitor? Silly.
Linux is the biggest POS of an OS I've seen, so it should be just what you're looking for.
Welcome! It's great to see people from the third world on slashdot, especially from extremely poor areas that have been unable to afford software like Windows.:-)
Um, bashing MS is not new. MS prommising to fix security is also not new. MS continually putting out shoddy insecurly designed and configured is also not new.
Instead of focusing on real basics like securing the design of outlook so it's not so prone to viruses and worms, changing the defaults in windows so that c:\windows isn't world-writable, not installing and running virtually every service by default, etc., etc., etc., MS is deciding to break things forcing people to upgrade ($$$) thinly shrouded in a disguise of "security".
When MS REALLY AND TRUELY gets serious on security, stops behaving badly (horrible invasive EULA's, stops the practice of embrace and extend, abusing competitors with the power of their monopoly, opens proprietary file formats and protocols, etc.), THEN I may stop bashing them. History proves that MS is NOT doing anything in your best interest but rather only what is the best interest of their bank account.
Oh yeah: Disclosure alert - Rossalina works for MS. Check her user info.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, if you are an IT manager that lacks creativity. The smart ones setup a single workstation (or vmware session) running MS office that the email server loops stuff through when it detects a .doc file on inbound email. This workstation exports the file in a more standard file format. This way you only need one copy of MS Office for the entire company.
That same workstation will also handle docs dumped on it by other users in the office.
Actually, people mostly complain about questions that can be answered by typing the fucking question into google.
/. questions that COULD be good except the question is so vague lacking any detail whatsoever that there is no way the poster will get any meaningful answer. Kinda like this one. What's that old saying? Garbage in, Garbage out.
There are some Ask
Ahh yeah, your right. I even had an applecat 212 modem. Internal, no AT command set. Ran my own "board" on it with 6 floppy drives. Sigh. Those were the days. No spam, no AOL, usenet was still viable and you could receive a full feed with a 2400bps modem.
Please mod my previous post as "-1 brainfart"
Um, even the modern version of Deb will fit in 2G. Depends on what you install, which would be Minimal for porting a DOS app. You wouldn't need X at all.
You REALLY don't want to use such an ancient version of debian for a new project.
Short answer: No.
Longer answer:
In DOS, you have full access to the hardware. This means that you read and write registers and I/O ports directly. Many DOS apps wrote directly to video memory for example. Most programmers did this for performance reasons, AND that it was easier.
For example: Let's say you had a form onscreen to fill out. What you did was use a ASCII screen designer tool that allowed you to play with all the attributes, and dump the contents of that to a file. This file could be included with your app (in a header file) or loaded from disk at runtime. Of course there were many other ways of doing this.
Since this guy uses a modem, he probably purchased one of the communication libraries that had x/y/zmodem, etc. and handled all the ideosyncracies of the 8250/16550 comm chips.
You also had to play lots of tricks if you wanted to access memory above 640K - you needed to run something like a DOS extender (PharLap comes to mind.)
So, no. It's not just a recompile. It's a port.
No doubt. the lack of info in this question makes it impossible to give any meaningful answer whatsoever.
That said, I ported a rather large DOS based app to Linux a few years ago. This was one that used light-pens, touch screen, several industrial control I/O boards, network card, modem, etc. There were only 2 big issues I had.
First, I had to write custom drivers for the hardware. This really wasn't too hard actually, since I had already been directly accessing the hardware through an abstraction layer.
Second was screen I/O. Again, since I wrote everything through an abstraction layer, it really wasn't that big of an issue.
If I had NOT used abstraction, (hiding the details of the underlying hardware) it would have taken MUCH longer to port. The app was about 150K lines of code.
Modem drivers? DOS apps never had a concept of modem drivers. Neither did any other OS on the planet until "winmodems" came out. Of course Winmodems don't work in plain dos either.
While this may be a new vunerability, lack of security in Windows is not a new argument.
Frankly, the only thing that is going to wake people up is a continual barrage of REALLY nasty viruses / worms that wipes out their entire system (or at least all their important files.)
Then again, there are people SO loyal to MS that they won't leave a burning house.
Agree, but you only had one little error. In this particular flaw, you don't get a pop-up. It downloads automatically and silently. You have no idea that you have been penetrated.
Hmm. Reading the above sentance, I just KNOW some karma whore is gonna make some comment about "penetration" and "MS"... Sigh.
It's interesting, but a rather useless statistic. Go read up on what others in the security industry are saying about this study.
:-)
If you look at the DETAILS of many linux advisories, you will find that many of them have no known exploits but rather a POTENTIAL that it MAY be possible to exploit the flaw. Also, 2002 is not over yet, and we have had several REALLY nasty MS flaws come to life. Aberdeen may have to restate the results
If the study looked at the severity of advisories on some sort of scale, the results would be quite different.
Note the WORDING of this press release: Open source software is now the major source of elevated security vulnerabilities for IT buyers.
Excuse me? IT buyers? What, do I BUY vunerabilities for linux now? From who, Microsoft? Anyone with a little intelligence can see right through this crap. WHen you use the word "buyers" you are dealing with marketing. PR. Spin. By the way, who paid for this study?
Anyway, what's that old saying again? There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
The problem is that larger media that could afford lawyers also have a vested interest in the DMCA being upheld. This is one of the downfalls of having most of our media controlled by only a few corporations.
Great! They can read my email! Now they will know the benefits of Herbal Viagra, how to enlarge their breasts, and be able to see hot teen cum-loving sluts!
Um, where did I say "remove XWindows"? X is fairly light. Most Window managers can be configured light as well. You don't need gnome / kde. Hell, I've done this. 8M works rather well for siple things like web browsing, email, simple word processing, etc. Yeah, your not going to be running OO (bloatware) but abiword would work fine. You must also be really young and don't realize that there was a world before Windows. People ran things like: DOS. Apple ][. C64.
The fucking point is that we are talking INDIA and other poor countries like it. It (like MANY other countries in the world) has a Very low GDP / capita. There are lots of older machines around, and people can't afford much. Hell, if they have a computer AT ALL they are lucky. The US ships lots of computer junk to china and other countries for disposal. Guess what? they don't just grind them up. They will pull out stuff that works and use them. That's if they even have electricity. It's also not gonna cost "thousands and thousands" for training. IT'S INDIA WE ARE TALKING ABOUT.
While you wouldn't want to run KDE on that system, you CAN run Linux, which is the point. The FACTS remain that you can do more with less hardware with a linux based system than you can with a Windows based system. Period.
In a quote from the article, Bill says:
"We can save money in terms of speed of development or by being able to run on less expensive hardware."
So I guess that's why WinCE handhelds are less expensive than Palm pilots. Oh, wait, they aren't less expensive. Oh but then there is desktops. Oh wait, what about the $199 walmart PC running linux being less expensive than the Windows counterpart... Considering that Linux runs on just about anything, the "less expensive hardware" just is totally untrue. Let's see Windows XP run on a 386 with 8M ram. Nice FUD Bill.
If you don't shovel your sidewalk and someone slips and falls, YOU are responsible. If you don't have a fence around your pool and some kid falls in and drowns, YOU are responsible. YOU need to start taking responsability for your own crap. Yes, the script kiddies are bad, they are criminals, but YOUR behavior enables their activity when you refuse to keep your software up to date.
Your argument is like "I refuse to lock my car, and I'm gonna leave the keys in the ignition. It's not my fault if someone takes it for a joy ride, gets into a car wreck, and kills 10 people."
To imply that I would laugh at starving kids in Africa is offensive.
This is flawed. With detailed information about how the vunerability works, I as a Network Admin can filter it out in my web proxy thus protecting my users. Full disclosure is MANDATORY for security folks to be able to do their job. Remember, the black-hat's already KNOW about the bug.
Frankly, the fact that there is an exploit to reformat peoples hard drives is a GOOD thing IMHO. As a matter of fact, I hope it bites tons of people. The fact that "the average user" doesn't check for updates and maintain their machine NEEDS TO CHANGE.
The auto is a great example. If you didn't maintain your car (change the tires, fix the brakes, etc.) when it needed to be done, YOU are a danger to yourself and others around you.
People who don't maintain their machines are a big problem on the net. They are responsible for being DDOS agents, virus distributers, etc. MS (and other software vendors including open source) being slow at releasing patches is ALSO an enabler for distructive issues on the net.
Back to the article, it IS irresponsible to release exploits when the vendor hasn't had a reasonable amount of time to fix the bug and distribute the patch. There is an indjustry accepted time frame for this. If the vunerability is already well known in the wild however, keeping it a secret from the public does NO GOOD WHATSOEVER. The script kiddies keep in touch via IRC, and other mechanisms so they will know about the vunerability anyway. Not releasing the info only harms the public as they will have no chance to be prepared. Admins can add filters to their proxies for example, but they need to know details about how the exploit works in order to do so.
Keeping secrets about vunerabilities that are already known to the black-hats only harms the rest of us.
impose hefty import duties on Microsoft's below-cost exports to the EU
This would only hurt EU companies because MS has a monopoly. This is a whole different ballgame than commodity items. No, I think the EU court has a better option in the anti-trust laws. They can force MS to all sorts of things like open API's, file formats, etc.
If you look at the US market, Coke and Pepsi pretty much share the market effectivly creating a shared monopoly. Nobody else can really compete with them from a mindshare point of view. In fact, I play one off the other, as the differences between the two companies products are minimal. I just buy which ever is cheaper. Both do an equally good job of quenching my thirst. While I may PREFER coke, either works fine.
The same is NOT true in the OS market, where apps can only run on one platform (the one they were compiled for.) The Mac / Linux / etc. can't effectivly compete in the desktop market as they are not compatible.
The way MS's monopoly works (and you already KNOW this) is that you get the OS REALLY cheap on new machines, but upgrades / retail sales are EXPENSIVE. The disparity between OEM prices and retail / upgrade prices is something I personally have a problem with.
Um, the court found by examining the evidence that MS IS a monopoly, and that was upheald on appeal. Your argument is moot, and wrong, and makes for good flamebait.
/. account has only been used in this article, it's clear that you are a troll, creating a throw away account just to incite others.
Considering that your
Go away you looser.
Actually, YOU don't seem to understand the basic definition of a monopoly. MS has a monopoly because the court found that there was not a viable competitor in the market - they have exclusive possesion or control of the desktop OS market.
The "abuse" of that monopoly (using monopoly power to leverage other business in a way that gives MS an unfair advantage) is the illegal part.
While I agree that "most people" don't care if MS used standards, I would bet that "most computer professionals" DO care, yet due to the monopoly issue can do very little about it. MS's failure to adhere to standards (and the embrace and extend practice) makes it REALLY flippin hard to interface MS systems to other non-MS systems.
I can see it now. Multicast the keystrokes to do a shutdown, wide open RW access to the C drive, etc.
Seriously though, this is silly. If you want remote monitors, just run remote desktop software which Would be of some use for tablet-PCs's. You take your tablet with you to a meeting and can access a spreadsheet currently open on your office machine. Now beaming from your tablet to a projector (or other tablets in the meeting) might be of some use (bluetooth would be best here), but to another desktop monitor? Silly.
Linux is the biggest POS of an OS I've seen, so it should be just what you're looking for.
:-)
Welcome! It's great to see people from the third world on slashdot, especially from extremely poor areas that have been unable to afford software like Windows.
Um, bashing MS is not new. MS prommising to fix security is also not new. MS continually putting out shoddy insecurly designed and configured is also not new.
Instead of focusing on real basics like securing the design of outlook so it's not so prone to viruses and worms, changing the defaults in windows so that c:\windows isn't world-writable, not installing and running virtually every service by default, etc., etc., etc., MS is deciding to break things forcing people to upgrade ($$$) thinly shrouded in a disguise of "security".
When MS REALLY AND TRUELY gets serious on security, stops behaving badly (horrible invasive EULA's, stops the practice of embrace and extend, abusing competitors with the power of their monopoly, opens proprietary file formats and protocols, etc.), THEN I may stop bashing them. History proves that MS is NOT doing anything in your best interest but rather only what is the best interest of their bank account.
Oh yeah: Disclosure alert - Rossalina works for MS. Check her user info.