If somebody wrote a program for linux that allowed shell scripts to run when you double-click 'em, do you really think it would be any more secure?
Slightly, because at least they would only affect one user's files, not system files, libraries, etc. That is unless someone logged in as root were stupid enough to run such an email client. Not nearly as likely. Does that mean that the Linux community doesn't need to keep a watchfull eye out? No. Does that mean I really expect problems similar to the ILOVEYOU virus? Not any time soon.
But the main reason that this isn't typically a problem is that unlike the MS-DOS/Windows method where executability is determined by file extension, in Linux/UNIX executability is determined by file permissions, which are normally set so the file isn't executable when it is downloaded. While it would certainly be possible for a program to be written for Linux with such a misfeature, I can't imagine that it would ever become popular enough within the Linux/UNIX community to become a target for virus authors. In order for something to become ubiquitous in the Linux community, it will need to be open source. And that will ensure that such a glaring problem will likely get fixed before it gets exploited much.
Outlook is such an attractive target for virus authors because it not only has its own security holes in addition to the generally lax security of the Windows 9x platform, but it is so ubiquitous that viruses written for it will affect the vast majority of Windows users that come into contact with it.
You could get a PC Unix from Interactive for around $500.
How complete was that? SCO had some 'runtime' packages that were in the $250 range at that time, but I'd hardly have considered them to be complete enough to be very useful (they didn't include networking, a compiler, any of the 'text processing' tools like vi, ex, sed, awk or troff). By the time you added up all the pieces in those 'ala cart' pricing schemes of the day, you were usually talking $1200-$1500 for the 'off brand' PC UNIXes and $2500-$3500 for SCO.
The cost of PC Unix wasn't the problem.
The cost of PC UNIX in that period wasn't the only problem. The hardware costs obviously were even worse, but I don't think you can say they weren't a problem at all.
It was not until 1995, when the costs of memory and hard drives had come down so much, that I returned to look at PC Unix and bought Slackware instead.
You really waited a long time to try Linux. In 1990 I bought three used NCR Tower 1632's which had 10MHz 68000's in them. The best of the bunch had 2M of RAM and a pair of 40M hard drives. They were slow and unreliable and ran a pretty dismal Version 7 UNIX variant. I jumped into Linux in mid '93, and first started trying to run 386BSD in early '93 when I was able to put together a PC-clone from enough cast-off junk parts.
I was never able to get 386BSD to run on it (panic'd right away), but I was able to get the Yggdrasil Linux BETA CD to work with it, and very soon after that the 1.01 version of Slackware.
My initial Linux hardware consisted of a 386DX-20 motherboard bought used. A case, keyboard, amber monitor and herc video card from a cast-off Samsung 286 PC aquired free, 8M worth of 1M 30-pin SIMMs aquired free as cast-offs from Sun upgrades from work. An Adaptec 1540B SCSI card and a Seagate 320M SCSI drive bought on the surplus market (Digital labeled). I think I put less than $300 into the initial hardware, although I was encouraged enough after my initial success with Linux to purchase a Cirrus 5422 based 1M SVGA card, a used 14" SVGA monitor and a few other parts. I think the most expensive parts of the initial system were the Adaptec card (about $100 if I remember right) and the hard drive (I think that set me back $120 if memory serves).
I was never able to get 386BSD to run on it (panic'd right away), but I was able to get the Yggdrasil BETA CD to work with it, and very soon after that the 1.01 version of Slackware.
Most of the places I know of are certainly not replacing UNIX boxes with Windows anything. They have Windows boxes, but those are generally being used for purposes other than what the UNIX boxes are doing. NT seems to be able to displace only Novell in any kind of numbers, and even then, slowly. I know of a lot of places that had large Netware installations that planned to have completely replaced Netware with NT two or three years ago that are still using Netware today.
Most of the VAXen in academia in those days ran 4.2 or 4.3BSD. I was administering and developing on some of them in the late 80's. Unfortunately BSD wasn't "totally free" in those days. It was still encumbered by AT&T source code and licensing. That didn't start changing until after the release of the NET2 distro, the settling of the AT&T vs. the world lawsuits and the work of people like the Jolitz's and others to replace the old AT&T bits. All that didn't really come together until 1993-1994 or so.
I hate to disagree, but you could get a complete 386DX system (incl. monitor and printer) for under $3000 in 1989. There were several varieties of Unix that would run on them (Xenix, SCO, and at least one other) -- admittedly, I don't know how much any of them cost at that time.
SCO was XENIX in those days, or rather, XENIX was from SCO. SCO was also selling a somewhat XENIX flavored SVR2 variant that was the lineal predecessor to the current OpenServer/OpenDesktop products at the time.
Unfortunately, all of the commercial *NIXes for the x86 at that time were seriously expensive, especially $CO, which would run you up to $4000 to get a complete system with networking and development tools.
Other *NIX variants that were around on the x86 in those days would include such things as MicroPort UNIX (an SVR3 port -- I technically greatly preferred their product to SCO's, although their marketing was far less successful than SCO), Interactive UNIX (at the time partially owned by Kodak, since bought by Sun), DELL's DNIX (SVR3 port, sold mainly with DELL hardware), Everex's ESIX (SVR3 port, sold mainly with Everex hardware) and AT&T's SVR3 for their 386WGS hardware (generally only sold bundled with the AT&T PC hardware).
In general, the hardware and software necessary to build a complete development environment in those days would still end up costing $5000 or more.
I actually ran into a problem with the FDIV bug in a real-world application I was working on. I had written some code that ran inside AutoCAD that was being used for design automation of steel joists/girders. The code was obviously very floating point intensive (lots of trig). While the code ran just fine on a Micron P90 machine I had and several 486's I tried it on, it failed on one of the customer's nearly identical Micron P90 machines. The only difference between the machines? The machine that was failing had an FDIV afflicted P90, while the one I had was a later stepping (despite being purchased before the failing unit). The customer swapped out the bad CPU for a good one under Intel's recall, and once the good CPU was installed the code worked without any problems.
While I'd agree the problem rarely caused problems for people, it did in at least one case cause someone (mostly me) some real grief. It also costed someone (my employer) some real money, in that I spent quite a number of hours troubleshooting the code and comparing the two machines. Given that the customer was about 800 miles away, they also incurred some additional costs in travel and shipping hardware to me for testing.
It isn't that small of a chance if he uses a dialup or dhcp cablemodem/dsl connection and he is on a large provider. If you get a different IP every time you connect, and a few other users on your ISP are pr0n surfers, chances are sooner or later you will have the same IP they have had in the past as you will both rotate through the IP pool.
I realize that these guys aren't exactly under the same rules as the government would be, but what they are doing smells a little too much like entrapment for me to be entirely comfortable with it.
It is too easy for people who aren't really pedophiles, but are just drawn into downloading these files just out of curiosity to get smeared and labeled by things like this.
My question is this: Is this medium really experiencing problems with people using it for transferring kiddie porn? If so, why aren't they targeting the people who upload it? Those are the people who are really the source of the problem.
While I don't have a problem busting people who really intentionally do something wrong, I think it is important to make sure we are getting the right people, not people who just get sucked into things due to stupidity or curiosity.
I've had a Sony Mavica FD7 for a couple of years, and it has performed quite well for me.
The Mavicas are expensive, a little on the large side and the floppy disk isn't super speedy, but there are a couple of things they beat all the other digital cameras I've looked at for... One thing is that the FD7, FD71, and FD73 have hands down the best zoom I've seen. 10x, and extremely smooth in and out -- a lot of other cameras I've looked at only have 2-3x zoom, and there is only like three levels. The Mavicas come with a rechargeable camcorder style battery, which beats using AA or AAA batteries like a lot of other cameras use -- I typically get several hours of use on a charge and I haven't had to replace the battery yet in a couple of years of service. The Mavicas also have a really great LCD display on them. But hands down, the big thing that sold me on the Mavica was the convenience, cheapness and ubiquitousness of the floppy for storage. I can buy floppies 24 hours a day even out in podunk center nowhere, because Wal-Mart carries floppies. I can buy a couple of boxes of floppies for what one smart media or memory stick costs. And I can slap a floppy into any computer anywhere I go and read the jpg's off it -- no having to install special download software or futz around with hooking up cables. And it doesn't matter if its a PC running Linux, PC running Windoze (blech), Mac, SparcStation, whatever. Just about everything can read a 1.4M floppy and deal with jpg's.
What I really want is the Mavica FD88. It has higher resolution (1280x960 if memory serves), faster floppy (4x) and 8x optical 8x digital zoom.
All in all, I wholeheartedly recommend the Mavica line.
Maybe things are different in Germany, but over here in the US, you can get as many 486's as you want for free. They typically have from 8 to 32M of RAM and have hard drives from 120-540M. Sometimes you even do a little better than that. I got a Pentium 60 for free not that long ago.
The point being, that if hardware good enough to run Linux is available for free or nearly so, why run Minix instead of Linux? If a 386SX with 2M of RAM and a 40M hard drive makes your day, wouldn't a 486DX2-66 with 24M, a 540M HD, a 3x SCSI CD-ROM drive and a 14" SVGA monitor (an example of an actual machine I got for free the other day -- all I had to do was add a keyboard and mouse) make it a lot better?
Does it really matter anymore if newer Linux distros no longer run well on old 386's? Maybe for what most of the 386's and low end 486's are being used for these days the single floppy sort of distros are more suitable?
As cheap as hardware is today, if you were designing say, an embeded device or handheld, would you start with anything less than a 486 core? I don't think there is much of any technical or financial reason to do so anymore. If you are designing something from scratch and don't need x86 compatibility, there are other processors that probably make more sense from the standpoints of cost, power consumption and heat generation anyway.
For home experimentation and dedicated purpose uses these days when you can get about as many 486's as you can haul away for FREE (as in beer) these days, why would anyone care about 386's, let alone 286's? A Turbo XT is more suitable as a museum piece than anything that anyone would want to use.
I know from experience because I've got stacks of 486's in my basement that people were happy to have me haul away for them.
Minix may have been interesting back when hardware was expensive, but it just doesn't seem that relevant anymore. The question is basically whether the low end you are talking about even exists anymore. Even in 1998, I just don't see how Minix would have been that much of a breakthrough. I think its day was more towards the early 90's, and for anything other than a tool for OS kernel design it looks to me like its day has been past for a long time.
You are right, I was being a bit harsh. I'm sure there are a lot of auditors that are technically inclined. I just haven't run into that many of them. Most of them that I've run into have an accounting background and view computers as just a tool for that purpose. It is worth noting that if your Anderson Consulting in the UK is part of the same Anderson Consulting that is one of the 'big five' in the US, that they are also in the IT consulting business. Undoubtedly people on that side of the business should have a lot more of a technical background than people in the financial/accounting side.
Is it because the Big Five don't know how to spell Linux or is it because they aren't really doing their job?
I work in a big financial IT shop where we have big five auditors in occasionally. From what I've seen the answer to your 'or' question is 'yes'. Most of the auditors that come in are utterly clueless about Windows, let alone anything non-Windows. They can basically muddle about a little in MS-Office and that is about it. I've actually had to help some of them import CSV files into Excel, including helping them figure out how to load files off of a floppy disk and unzip them.
I've also seen them sit down at a SparcStation and be rather puzzled when confronted by the login box... Then turn the power off, watch it reboot and come back up to the same point. At which time I told them 'that isn't a PC'. Blank expression. 'You can't run Outlook or MS-Office on that, it isn't a PC'. Blank expression. 'Use that PC over there'. Auditor shuffles off looking confused...
I would think that the vendor integrity statement problem could be gotten around by purchasing shrinkwrap box versions and then having the vendor of those distributions sign the paperwork the government wants.
Someone should talk to the distribution vendors to see what efforts they could make to add and document C2 auditing to their distributions. I'd think if they thought they could get a significant number of sales to government agencies they would view that as a good investment in resources.
Tables: nope. Columns: yep. Bulleted lists: nope. WordPerfect is better with columns. Word is better at tables and bullted lists,
Well, I would tend to disagree, especially about bulleted lists. While I was able to eventually figure out how to make MS-Word do what I wanted with both of those things, it was much easier to figure out in WordPerfect, and less cumbersome to do once figured out than it was in MS-Word.
however there is a learning curve. It is not initially intuitive,
Uh, but the thing that MS-fans are always harping about is supposedly easier and more intuitive user interfaces in Microsoft's products. With the case of table editing and bulleted lists, that certainly is backwards, in that WordPerfect seemed a lot more intuitive and generally simpler. Also Microsoft's online help was next to useless in trying to figure out those options. I can't say anything one way or the other about WordPerfect's online help, as I've been able to figure out everything I wanted to do without needing to look at it. Not something I can say about MS-Word.
but once learned, it is a very useful tool.
MS-Word isn't totally unusable (except perhaps for multicolumn layouts), but I will stand by my opinion that WordPerfect works much better for me than MS-Word.
Odd, I think most people liked WP5.1 and started to dislike it when they poorly attempted the GUI.
Poorly attempted? 6.0 wasn't that bad, at least it wasn't any worse than Microsoft's GUI for MS-Word of that era. If you want to see a really bad GUI design, look at the first version of WP for the Mac. Woof, what a dog. It had all of the 40 f-key commands of the 4.2 DOS version stuck in a single drop-down menu. Blech.
WP lost out to MS-Word mainly because they were slow to do a Windows version at all, as they fell for Microsoft's fake-out with OS/2 and spent a lot of effort supporting it while Microsoft was secretly working on undercutting OS/2 with Windows and plotting to take over the applications markets from Lotus and WordPerfect.
WP5.1 was incredibly useful and fast (although there was a nasty learning curve with all the ctrl-alt-shift-Fx crap)
The horror. That was what I hated about the MS-DOS versions of WordPerfect. I was never actually an MS-DOS user. I didn't buy an x86 machine until '93, and that was put together specifically to run *nix. I had intended to run 386BSD, but could never get it to work with the cobbled together junk parts I had at the time, so I tried Linux, and it worked, and I have been using it every since.
MS sent me a nice, free copy of O2K and it is the thing that really keeps me out of linux.
MS doesn't send me free stuff (only fair since I don't buy or recommend any of their stuff). Frankly, I'm always skeptical when they are giving away anything for free, as it often has strings attached in the long run. That isn't just Microsoft either, I am always a little skeptical of 'free lunches'... Not to say I won't take them, but I like to know if there is a fish hook in the bait before I bite in.
If you're like me, you have to do documents and spreadsheets, and you can't just send someone a damn.xml file. As cool as XML is, I need to be able to save as.xls.
I almost never need to do anything with spreadsheets other than open up spreadsheets other people send me. So I really only need to be able to read.xls files, and then only very occasionally.
I'd agree that I don't care for the 'desktop' integration in newer versions of StarOffice. I'd prefer to be able to split the applications. However, I'd rather deal with that than have to go find a machine to install MS-Office on, especially since I'd have to install MS-Windows on it first, and I don't have a copy of MS-Windows or MS-Office, or a spare machine that has enough horsepower to run those effectively. I only use MS-Office at work, and only because I am basically stuck with it there. That and Outhouse^h^h^u^e^hlook are just about the only reasons I ever touch the PC on my desk there -- I do most of my work there on Solaris. That will be changing soon as I am changing jobs to a place that is much more UNIX/Linux centric and I will be able to control the images on my local workstations.
Which year in the future would anyone be willing to pick in which Amigas will sell more than 1% of the number of Macs that sell...
I just have no confidence that Amino is well funded enough to pull this off and come up with anything that is modern and capable enough to take off at all, let alone that they have the ability to market it enough to sell even a good product.
There just isn't much of a market for 1994 era machines based on 1985 technology in 2000. And those machine were never able to carve out a viable niche in their day. It will take a huge amount of modernization to bring them up to date, and they will have a really tough time competing against entrenched competitors like Wintel, Mac and Linux which through brute force can match or exceed the capabilities of those old machines in just about every way.
The Amiga still has a certain nostalgia appeal to many computerheads, but that won't sell enough units for it to be viable.
I rarely ever do anything complex with footnotes, but they are a big issue for some people, especially lawyers. WordPerfect's superior handling of footnotes is one of the things that is often listed as a reason why law firms are still a bastion of support for WordPerfect. That and the fact that most of them have huge template libraries that are in WordPerfect format (which unlike MS-Word hasn't changed gratuitously for every version. Another reason is that so many of them have automation systems using WordPerfect's scripting language (it had scripting way before the VBA stuff was added to MS-Office) that would be a lot of work to rewrite.
It only took me about an hour to get it working with NT the first time I tried it. It may not exactly be a no-brainer, but it is easier to get working correctly than most of the NFS add-ons I've seen for NT.
SCO Unix was XENIX, which was a Microsoft Product.
Partially true, however XENIX was a 16 bit product at the time that Microsoft sold it off to SCO. Also by the time the product was renamed 'SCO UNIX' and became 32 bit, the XENIX kernel had been largely replaced by SVR2 code. The closest XENIX came to 32 bit when it was still a Microsoft product was the 68K versions, which were a 32 bit internal and 16 bit external processor (the first true 32 bit 68K, the 68020, wasn't out at that time). XENIX was also itself largely based on the Bell Labs Version 7 experimental version of UNIX, so Microsoft can't really take much more credit than having done a port.
The truly sad thing is it took so long from the time Microsoft abandoned XENIX to the time that NT came out, which was around 10 years. Microsoft certainly could have had a 32 bit OS in 1986 or 1987 when the 386 started showing up had they been on the ball. Heck, they bailed out on OS/2 before a workable 32 bit version of it came out, which is part of the reason they were so late to the 32 bit game.
Your milage may vary. My educational background is not dissimilar to yours. I also attended a midwestern University, in my case for about 2.5 to 3 years before I ran out of money. One difference is that I worked for a department at the university as a C/C++ programmer/UNIX sysadmin during the time I was in school and for about 6 months after I dropped out. The pay was really bad, but I got a lot of valuable experience that I was able to use to get my 2nd job. My second job was a middle entry level job doing Informix 4GL programming, database and UNIX administration. It paid about double what my university job did and had actual benefits (which the university didn't pay for hourly people). After a couple of years doing that I was able to move up to a decent job doing C/C++ development at a small (30 person) company for a salary in the middle range for experienced developers at the time. And after 3-4 years I was able to move up to a different position at a larger company (100k+ employees) making towards the middle to upper end of the range for C/C++ developers. During my time there I've gotten several promotions and decent raises. I am just getting ready to start a new position after 3-4 years at the previously mentioned company. I've got more experience now doing web development in Java, Perl, etc. My new position will put me well into the upper range for developers in the area.
You are right to a certain extent that someone without a degree or experience will have to 'pay their dues', but I am not at all sorry for having taken the path I chose. I wouldn't recommend it without hessitation to everyone though. It does require that you be stubborn, dedicated and willing to work hard to prove yourself.
Im curious if VB still suffers from the bad image BASIC has had in academia.
Yes. It suffers pretty much the same bad image with a large share of the professional development community as well of course, even a pretty fair percentage of the Windows development community.
Delphi/Object Pascal is somewhat safer than C/C++ only because it is somewhat more limited in what or how you can use pointers. But that is a pretty marginal thing. You can certainly shoot yourself in the foot with pointers in either language. Whether it is faster or not is largely a matter of opinion, and which tool a given person is personally more comfortable with, and also which C/C++ tools are selected. To say 'a whole lot faster' is really not a fair generalization.
Probably my biggest complaint against Object Pascal/Delphi is that it is still mostly a uniplatform tool (albiet FreePascal and a couple of other free alternatives are in development, none are really finished and completely compatible with the Borland products yet). C/C++ multiplatform compatibility isn't perfect, far from it -- especially when moving code between Windows and and Linux/*nix/*BSD platforms. But at this point nontrivial C/C++ code that is written with the intention of being portable is much more likely to be so than any current Pascal dialect. There are also more 3rd party (free and commercial) products designed to work with C/C++ to aid in cross platform work than there are specifically tailored to any Pascal dialect. Much as some people deride it, few languages are as close to multiplatform as Java is at this point (not to say that Java is without problems either).
None of this may be that salient to the contest in question, but they certainly are things that often matter in the real world.
That is a pretty silly reason to avoid a product. Like the penguin mascot or not, it is a symbol that people recognize. You can't blame companies for recognizing that and taking advantage of it. You could just as easily be critical of Microsoft using their little warped windowpane logo and all of the companies that use it. It is pretty unfair to assume that the motivation of every company that uses the Penguin logo is doing it just to seem 'l33t and kewl'. It sounds more like you are the one trying to pose an image by being critical of companies which don't fit some preconceived image. And you acuse me of being on crack? Eh, whatever. As for you not buying the product, how much money do you really plan to spend on software in the next year? How much software do you specify, recommend or approve at your job in a year? Are you really that big of a loss?
It may be fair to a certain extent to be critical of companies that are jumping on the bandwagon late, but I don't think that this is a fair criticism of Corel, as they've been flirting with the Linux market for quite a while. The current WordPerfect 8 for Linux under their own label isn't the first version. I was using WordPerfect 6 years ago, which was a colaborative effort with Caldera.
I would prefer to judge companies on how good their products are, and how well they live up to their promises on product delivery. So far I think Corel stacks up fairly reasonably. I've used WordPerfect 8, and it seems to work fine for me. I've heard both good and bad reports about Corel's Linux distribution, but it is after all, their first real attempt at a distribution, and it will probably get better as it matures. I don't know of any distribution of anything that doesn't have some people complain about it anyway, not Windows, not MacOS, not Solaris, not Red Hat. So time will tell if Corel's distro is a long term player. As for Corel Office 2000, they have at least lived up to their promise to ship it. I hope to get it pretty soon and see how well it works. That will be the real test. I am also waiting for Corel Draw. If they deliver that for Linux, they will have lived up to most if not all of their promises to the Linux community, and that is a pretty good track record for anyone.
Wouldn't a better sign of selling power be if they were disappearing from the shelves, rather than occupying them?
Hard to say they aren't selling, since neither of us have access to CompUSA or Best Buy's inventory system. But I believe that those chains aren't stupid, and products that aren't selling don't stay on their inventory lists for long.
Now, if you're saying that they must be doing well to even have been on the shelf in the first place, I have to note that Microsoft BOB (!) and OS/2 Warp 4 used to be found on store shelves as well.:)
Those products disappeared from shelves for a different reason, they didn't sell, so they got pulled. Even though they came from large and influential vendors who can afford to pay for shelf space if necessary they disappeared. Linux products don't generally have those advantages, as they typically come from smaller vendors without the kind of huge pocketbooks and influence that IBM and Microsoft have. The number of Linux titles on the shelf at the local stores is increasing, not decreasing. I would guess that this would not be happening if the titles that are there weren't selling.
I agree with you that there aren't as many cheapskates in the Linux world as in the Windows world, but that's because Windows users make up around 95% of the users. In percentage terms, though, I'd peg the percentage of Linux cheapskates as substantially higher than that for WIndows.
I'd have to disagree.
There are no doubt loads of warez kiddies on the Windows side,
It's not just warez-kiddies either, it is a large portion of the home Windows user market, even older, 'churchgoing-godfearing' types I know engage in a fair amount of piracy.
but they end up accounting for a small portion of the total users.
As I said, I don't think warez-kiddies are more than the tip of the iceberg in the Windows piracy world. The difference is that the Microsoft world is currently enough larger that it can bear a lot more losses to piracy than the Linux world can.
On the other hand, you've got to admit that the stereotype of the Linux user isn't all that far from the demeanor of your average warez kiddie.
Oh please. I have to admit nothing of the kind. For one thing, putting significance to stereotypes is a pretty stupid thing to do to begin with. For another thing, most of the Linux users I know are in their late 20's to mid 30's, and are not at all representative of that stereotype. A large portion of the Linux users I know are computer professionals.
I'm of the opinion that there's a good-sized overlap. (Note that I'm not referring to someone who might engage in an offhand license abuse -- the percentages of those are probably high in both camps -- but the type unwilling to pay for anything.
I would believe that there is a small overlap, but I think you are way off base in your judgement of the Linux community. The antics of a overly noisy bunch (that being the warez-kiddies and zealots on both sides) seems to have clouded your judgement, or you are trying to bend reality to fit your pre-formed opinion of how the world is.
I don't know for sure that you can't, but if you can't, that would be a good thing, no?:-) The fact that macro viruses aren't as common for WordPerfect as for Microsoft products is another good reason for me to use WordPerfect even if Microsoft was to do a version of MS-Office for Linux.
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If somebody wrote a program for linux that allowed shell scripts to run when you double-click 'em, do you really think it would be any more secure?
Slightly, because at least they would only affect one user's files, not system files, libraries, etc. That is unless someone logged in as root were stupid enough to run such an email client. Not nearly as likely. Does that mean that the Linux community doesn't need to keep a watchfull eye out? No. Does that mean I really expect problems similar to the ILOVEYOU virus? Not any time soon.
But the main reason that this isn't typically a problem is that unlike the MS-DOS/Windows method where executability is determined by file extension, in Linux/UNIX executability is determined by file permissions, which are normally set so the file isn't executable when it is downloaded. While it would certainly be possible for a program to be written for Linux with such a misfeature, I can't imagine that it would ever become popular enough within the Linux/UNIX community to become a target for virus authors. In order for something to become ubiquitous in the Linux community, it will need to be open source. And that will ensure that such a glaring problem will likely get fixed before it gets exploited much.
Outlook is such an attractive target for virus authors because it not only has its own security holes in addition to the generally lax security of the Windows 9x platform, but it is so ubiquitous that viruses written for it will affect the vast majority of Windows users that come into contact with it.
You could get a PC Unix from Interactive for around $500.
How complete was that? SCO had some 'runtime' packages that were in the $250 range at that time, but I'd hardly have considered them to be complete enough to be very useful (they didn't include networking, a compiler, any of the 'text processing' tools like vi, ex, sed, awk or troff). By the time you added up all the pieces in those 'ala cart' pricing schemes of the day, you were usually talking $1200-$1500 for the 'off brand' PC UNIXes and $2500-$3500 for SCO.
The cost of PC Unix wasn't the problem.
The cost of PC UNIX in that period wasn't the only problem. The hardware costs obviously were even worse, but I don't think you can say they weren't a problem at all.
It was not until 1995, when the costs of memory and hard drives had come down so much, that I returned to look at PC Unix and bought Slackware instead.
You really waited a long time to try Linux. In 1990 I bought three used NCR Tower 1632's which had 10MHz 68000's in them. The best of the bunch had 2M of RAM and a pair of 40M hard drives. They were slow and unreliable and ran a pretty dismal Version 7 UNIX variant. I jumped into Linux in mid '93, and first started trying to run 386BSD in early '93 when I was able to put together a PC-clone from enough cast-off junk parts.
I was never able to get 386BSD to run on it (panic'd right away), but I was able to get the Yggdrasil Linux BETA CD to work with it, and very soon after that the 1.01 version of Slackware.
My initial Linux hardware consisted of a 386DX-20 motherboard bought used. A case, keyboard, amber monitor and herc video card from a cast-off Samsung 286 PC aquired free, 8M worth of 1M 30-pin SIMMs aquired free as cast-offs from Sun upgrades from work. An Adaptec 1540B SCSI card and a Seagate 320M SCSI drive bought on the surplus market (Digital labeled). I think I put less than $300 into the initial hardware, although I was encouraged enough after my initial success with Linux to purchase a Cirrus 5422 based 1M SVGA card, a used 14" SVGA monitor and a few other parts. I think the most expensive parts of the initial system were the Adaptec card (about $100 if I remember right) and the hard drive (I think that set me back $120 if memory serves).
I was never able to get 386BSD to run on it (panic'd right away), but I was able to get the Yggdrasil BETA CD to work with it, and very soon after that the 1.01 version of Slackware.
Linux boxes, mainly...
Most of the places I know of are certainly not replacing UNIX boxes with Windows anything. They have Windows boxes, but those are generally being used for purposes other than what the UNIX boxes are doing. NT seems to be able to displace only Novell in any kind of numbers, and even then, slowly. I know of a lot of places that had large Netware installations that planned to have completely replaced Netware with NT two or three years ago that are still using Netware today.
Most of the VAXen in academia in those days ran 4.2 or 4.3BSD. I was administering and developing on some of them in the late 80's. Unfortunately BSD wasn't "totally free" in those days. It was still encumbered by AT&T source code and licensing. That didn't start changing until after the release of the NET2 distro, the settling of the AT&T vs. the world lawsuits and the work of people like the Jolitz's and others to replace the old AT&T bits. All that didn't really come together until 1993-1994 or so.
I hate to disagree, but you could get a complete 386DX system (incl. monitor and printer) for under $3000 in 1989. There were several varieties of Unix that would run on them (Xenix, SCO, and at least one other) -- admittedly, I don't know how much any of them cost at that time.
SCO was XENIX in those days, or rather, XENIX was from SCO. SCO was also selling a somewhat XENIX flavored SVR2 variant that was the lineal predecessor to the current OpenServer/OpenDesktop products at the time.
Unfortunately, all of the commercial *NIXes for the x86 at that time were seriously expensive, especially $CO, which would run you up to $4000 to get a complete system with networking and development tools.
Other *NIX variants that were around on the x86 in those days would include such things as MicroPort UNIX (an SVR3 port -- I technically greatly preferred their product to SCO's, although their marketing was far less successful than SCO), Interactive UNIX (at the time partially owned by Kodak, since bought by Sun), DELL's DNIX (SVR3 port, sold mainly with DELL hardware), Everex's ESIX (SVR3 port, sold mainly with Everex hardware) and AT&T's SVR3 for their 386WGS hardware (generally only sold bundled with the AT&T PC hardware).
In general, the hardware and software necessary to build a complete development environment in those days would still end up costing $5000 or more.
I actually ran into a problem with the FDIV bug in a real-world application I was working on. I had written some code that ran inside AutoCAD that was being used for design automation of steel joists/girders. The code was obviously very floating point intensive (lots of trig). While the code ran just fine on a Micron P90 machine I had and several 486's I tried it on, it failed on one of the customer's nearly identical Micron P90 machines. The only difference between the machines? The machine that was failing had an FDIV afflicted P90, while the one I had was a later stepping (despite being purchased before the failing unit). The customer swapped out the bad CPU for a good one under Intel's recall, and once the good CPU was installed the code worked without any problems.
While I'd agree the problem rarely caused problems for people, it did in at least one case cause someone (mostly me) some real grief. It also costed someone (my employer) some real money, in that I spent quite a number of hours troubleshooting the code and comparing the two machines. Given that the customer was about 800 miles away, they also incurred some additional costs in travel and shipping hardware to me for testing.
It isn't that small of a chance if he uses a dialup or dhcp cablemodem/dsl connection and he is on a large provider. If you get a different IP every time you connect, and a few other users on your ISP are pr0n surfers, chances are sooner or later you will have the same IP they have had in the past as you will both rotate through the IP pool.
I realize that these guys aren't exactly under the same rules as the government would be, but what they are doing smells a little too much like entrapment for me to be entirely comfortable with it.
It is too easy for people who aren't really pedophiles, but are just drawn into downloading these files just out of curiosity to get smeared and labeled by things like this.
My question is this: Is this medium really experiencing problems with people using it for transferring kiddie porn? If so, why aren't they targeting the people who upload it? Those are the people who are really the source of the problem.
While I don't have a problem busting people who really intentionally do something wrong, I think it is important to make sure we are getting the right people, not people who just get sucked into things due to stupidity or curiosity.
I've had a Sony Mavica FD7 for a couple of years, and it has performed quite well for me.
The Mavicas are expensive, a little on the large side and the floppy disk isn't super speedy, but there are a couple of things they beat all the other digital cameras I've looked at for... One thing is that the FD7, FD71, and FD73 have hands down the best zoom I've seen. 10x, and extremely smooth in and out -- a lot of other cameras I've looked at only have 2-3x zoom, and there is only like three levels. The Mavicas come with a rechargeable camcorder style battery, which beats using AA or AAA batteries like a lot of other cameras use -- I typically get several hours of use on a charge and I haven't had to replace the battery yet in a couple of years of service. The Mavicas also have a really great LCD display on them. But hands down, the big thing that sold me on the Mavica was the convenience, cheapness and ubiquitousness of the floppy for storage. I can buy floppies 24 hours a day even out in podunk center nowhere, because Wal-Mart carries floppies. I can buy a couple of boxes of floppies for what one smart media or memory stick costs. And I can slap a floppy into any computer anywhere I go and read the jpg's off it -- no having to install special download software or futz around with hooking up cables. And it doesn't matter if its a PC running Linux, PC running Windoze (blech), Mac, SparcStation, whatever. Just about everything can read a 1.4M floppy and deal with jpg's.
What I really want is the Mavica FD88. It has higher resolution (1280x960 if memory serves), faster floppy (4x) and 8x optical 8x digital zoom.
All in all, I wholeheartedly recommend the Mavica line.
Maybe things are different in Germany, but over here in the US, you can get as many 486's as you want for free. They typically have from 8 to 32M of RAM and have hard drives from 120-540M. Sometimes you even do a little better than that. I got a Pentium 60 for free not that long ago.
The point being, that if hardware good enough to run Linux is available for free or nearly so, why run Minix instead of Linux? If a 386SX with 2M of RAM and a 40M hard drive makes your day, wouldn't a 486DX2-66 with 24M, a 540M HD, a 3x SCSI CD-ROM drive and a 14" SVGA monitor (an example of an actual machine I got for free the other day -- all I had to do was add a keyboard and mouse) make it a lot better?
Does it really matter anymore if newer Linux distros no longer run well on old 386's? Maybe for what most of the 386's and low end 486's are being used for these days the single floppy sort of distros are more suitable?
As cheap as hardware is today, if you were designing say, an embeded device or handheld, would you start with anything less than a 486 core? I don't think there is much of any technical or financial reason to do so anymore. If you are designing something from scratch and don't need x86 compatibility, there are other processors that probably make more sense from the standpoints of cost, power consumption and heat generation anyway.
For home experimentation and dedicated purpose uses these days when you can get about as many 486's as you can haul away for FREE (as in beer) these days, why would anyone care about 386's, let alone 286's? A Turbo XT is more suitable as a museum piece than anything that anyone would want to use.
I know from experience because I've got stacks of 486's in my basement that people were happy to have me haul away for them.
Minix may have been interesting back when hardware was expensive, but it just doesn't seem that relevant anymore. The question is basically whether the low end you are talking about even exists anymore. Even in 1998, I just don't see how Minix would have been that much of a breakthrough. I think its day was more towards the early 90's, and for anything other than a tool for OS kernel design it looks to me like its day has been past for a long time.
You are right, I was being a bit harsh. I'm sure there are a lot of auditors that are technically inclined. I just haven't run into that many of them. Most of them that I've run into have an accounting background and view computers as just a tool for that purpose. It is worth noting that if your Anderson Consulting in the UK is part of the same Anderson Consulting that is one of the 'big five' in the US, that they are also in the IT consulting business. Undoubtedly people on that side of the business should have a lot more of a technical background than people in the financial/accounting side.
Is it because the Big Five don't know how to spell Linux or is it because they aren't really doing their job?
I work in a big financial IT shop where we have big five auditors in occasionally. From what I've seen the answer to your 'or' question is 'yes'. Most of the auditors that come in are utterly clueless about Windows, let alone anything non-Windows. They can basically muddle about a little in MS-Office and that is about it. I've actually had to help some of them import CSV files into Excel, including helping them figure out how to load files off of a floppy disk and unzip them.
I've also seen them sit down at a SparcStation and be rather puzzled when confronted by the login box... Then turn the power off, watch it reboot and come back up to the same point. At which time I told them 'that isn't a PC'. Blank expression. 'You can't run Outlook or MS-Office on that, it isn't a PC'. Blank expression. 'Use that PC over there'. Auditor shuffles off looking confused...
I would think that the vendor integrity statement problem could be gotten around by purchasing shrinkwrap box versions and then having the vendor of those distributions sign the paperwork the government wants.
Someone should talk to the distribution vendors to see what efforts they could make to add and document C2 auditing to their distributions. I'd think if they thought they could get a significant number of sales to government agencies they would view that as a good investment in resources.
Tables: nope. Columns: yep. Bulleted lists: nope. WordPerfect is better with columns. Word is better at tables and bullted lists,
.xml file. As cool as XML is, I need to be able to save as .xls.
.xls files, and then only very occasionally.
Well, I would tend to disagree, especially about bulleted lists. While I was able to eventually figure out how to make MS-Word do what I wanted with both of those things, it was much easier to figure out in WordPerfect, and less cumbersome to do once figured out than it was in MS-Word.
however there is a learning curve. It is not initially intuitive,
Uh, but the thing that MS-fans are always harping about is supposedly easier and more intuitive user interfaces in Microsoft's products. With the case of table editing and bulleted lists, that certainly is backwards, in that WordPerfect seemed a lot more intuitive and generally simpler. Also Microsoft's online help was next to useless in trying to figure out those options. I can't say anything one way or the other about WordPerfect's online help, as I've been able to figure out everything I wanted to do without needing to look at it. Not something I can say about MS-Word.
but once learned, it is a very useful tool.
MS-Word isn't totally unusable (except perhaps for multicolumn layouts), but I will stand by my opinion that WordPerfect works much better for me than MS-Word.
Odd, I think most people liked WP5.1 and started to dislike it when they poorly attempted the GUI.
Poorly attempted? 6.0 wasn't that bad, at least it wasn't any worse than Microsoft's GUI for MS-Word of that era. If you want to see a really bad GUI design, look at the first version of WP for the Mac. Woof, what a dog. It had all of the 40 f-key commands of the 4.2 DOS version stuck in a single drop-down menu. Blech.
WP lost out to MS-Word mainly because they were slow to do a Windows version at all, as they fell for Microsoft's fake-out with OS/2 and spent a lot of effort supporting it while Microsoft was secretly working on undercutting OS/2 with Windows and plotting to take over the applications markets from Lotus and WordPerfect.
WP5.1 was incredibly useful and fast (although there was a nasty learning curve with all the ctrl-alt-shift-Fx crap)
The horror. That was what I hated about the MS-DOS versions of WordPerfect. I was never actually an MS-DOS user. I didn't buy an x86 machine until '93, and that was put together specifically to run *nix. I had intended to run 386BSD, but could never get it to work with the cobbled together junk parts I had at the time, so I tried Linux, and it worked, and I have been using it every since.
MS sent me a nice, free copy of O2K and it is the thing that really keeps me out of linux.
MS doesn't send me free stuff (only fair since I don't buy or recommend any of their stuff). Frankly, I'm always skeptical when they are giving away anything for free, as it often has strings attached in the long run. That isn't just Microsoft either, I am always a little skeptical of 'free lunches'... Not to say I won't take them, but I like to know if there is a fish hook in the bait before I bite in.
If you're like me, you have to do documents and spreadsheets, and you can't just send someone a damn
I almost never need to do anything with spreadsheets other than open up spreadsheets other people send me. So I really only need to be able to read
I'd agree that I don't care for the 'desktop' integration in newer versions of StarOffice. I'd prefer to be able to split the applications. However, I'd rather deal with that than have to go find a machine to install MS-Office on, especially since I'd have to install MS-Windows on it first, and I don't have a copy of MS-Windows or MS-Office, or a spare machine that has enough horsepower to run those effectively. I only use MS-Office at work, and only because I am basically stuck with it there. That and Outhouse^h^h^u^e^hlook are just about the only reasons I ever touch the PC on my desk there -- I do most of my work there on Solaris. That will be changing soon as I am changing jobs to a place that is much more UNIX/Linux centric and I will be able to control the images on my local workstations.
Which year in the future would anyone be willing to pick in which Amigas will sell more than 1% of the number of Macs that sell...
I just have no confidence that Amino is well funded enough to pull this off and come up with anything that is modern and capable enough to take off at all, let alone that they have the ability to market it enough to sell even a good product.
There just isn't much of a market for 1994 era machines based on 1985 technology in 2000. And those machine were never able to carve out a viable niche in their day. It will take a huge amount of modernization to bring them up to date, and they will have a really tough time competing against entrenched competitors like Wintel, Mac and Linux which through brute force can match or exceed the capabilities of those old machines in just about every way.
The Amiga still has a certain nostalgia appeal to many computerheads, but that won't sell enough units for it to be viable.
I rarely ever do anything complex with footnotes, but they are a big issue for some people, especially lawyers. WordPerfect's superior handling of footnotes is one of the things that is often listed as a reason why law firms are still a bastion of support for WordPerfect. That and the fact that most of them have huge template libraries that are in WordPerfect format (which unlike MS-Word hasn't changed gratuitously for every version. Another reason is that so many of them have automation systems using WordPerfect's scripting language (it had scripting way before the VBA stuff was added to MS-Office) that would be a lot of work to rewrite.
It only took me about an hour to get it working with NT the first time I tried it. It may not exactly be a no-brainer, but it is easier to get working correctly than most of the NFS add-ons I've seen for NT.
this is so discussion is so lame.. *sigh* ...
Then why participate at all?
SCO Unix was XENIX, which was a Microsoft Product.
Partially true, however XENIX was a 16 bit product at the time that Microsoft sold it off to SCO. Also by the time the product was renamed 'SCO UNIX' and became 32 bit, the XENIX kernel had been largely replaced by SVR2 code. The closest XENIX came to 32 bit when it was still a Microsoft product was the 68K versions, which were a 32 bit internal and 16 bit external processor (the first true 32 bit 68K, the 68020, wasn't out at that time). XENIX was also itself largely based on the Bell Labs Version 7 experimental version of UNIX, so Microsoft can't really take much more credit than having done a port.
The truly sad thing is it took so long from the time Microsoft abandoned XENIX to the time that NT came out, which was around 10 years. Microsoft certainly could have had a 32 bit OS in 1986 or 1987 when the 386 started showing up had they been on the ball. Heck, they bailed out on OS/2 before a workable 32 bit version of it came out, which is part of the reason they were so late to the 32 bit game.
Your milage may vary. My educational background is not dissimilar to yours. I also attended a midwestern University, in my case for about 2.5 to 3 years before I ran out of money. One difference is that I worked for a department at the university as a C/C++ programmer/UNIX sysadmin during the time I was in school and for about 6 months after I dropped out. The pay was really bad, but I got a lot of valuable experience that I was able to use to get my 2nd job. My second job was a middle entry level job doing Informix 4GL programming, database and UNIX administration. It paid about double what my university job did and had actual benefits (which the university didn't pay for hourly people). After a couple of years doing that I was able to move up to a decent job doing C/C++ development at a small (30 person) company for a salary in the middle range for experienced developers at the time. And after 3-4 years I was able to move up to a different position at a larger company (100k+ employees) making towards the middle to upper end of the range for C/C++ developers. During my time there I've gotten several promotions and decent raises. I am just getting ready to start a new position after 3-4 years at the previously mentioned company. I've got more experience now doing web development in Java, Perl, etc. My new position will put me well into the upper range for developers in the area.
You are right to a certain extent that someone without a degree or experience will have to 'pay their dues', but I am not at all sorry for having taken the path I chose. I wouldn't recommend it without hessitation to everyone though. It does require that you be stubborn, dedicated and willing to work hard to prove yourself.
Im curious if VB still suffers from the bad image BASIC has had in academia.
Yes. It suffers pretty much the same bad image with a large share of the professional development community as well of course, even a pretty fair percentage of the Windows development community.
Delphi/Object Pascal is somewhat safer than C/C++ only because it is somewhat more limited in what or how you can use pointers. But that is a pretty marginal thing. You can certainly shoot yourself in the foot with pointers in either language. Whether it is faster or not is largely a matter of opinion, and which tool a given person is personally more comfortable with, and also which C/C++ tools are selected. To say 'a whole lot faster' is really not a fair generalization.
Probably my biggest complaint against Object Pascal/Delphi is that it is still mostly a uniplatform tool (albiet FreePascal and a couple of other free alternatives are in development, none are really finished and completely compatible with the Borland products yet). C/C++ multiplatform compatibility isn't perfect, far from it -- especially when moving code between Windows and and Linux/*nix/*BSD platforms. But at this point nontrivial C/C++ code that is written with the intention of being portable is much more likely to be so than any current Pascal dialect. There are also more 3rd party (free and commercial) products designed to work with C/C++ to aid in cross platform work than there are specifically tailored to any Pascal dialect. Much as some people deride it, few languages are as close to multiplatform as Java is at this point (not to say that Java is without problems either).
None of this may be that salient to the contest in question, but they certainly are things that often matter in the real world.
I feel like I am feeding trolls here, but...
That is a pretty silly reason to avoid a product. Like the penguin mascot or not, it is a symbol that people recognize. You can't blame companies for recognizing that and taking advantage of it. You could just as easily be critical of Microsoft using their little warped windowpane logo and all of the companies that use it. It is pretty unfair to assume that the motivation of every company that uses the Penguin logo is doing it just to seem 'l33t and kewl'. It sounds more like you are the one trying to pose an image by being critical of companies which don't fit some preconceived image. And you acuse me of being on crack? Eh, whatever. As for you not buying the product, how much money do you really plan to spend on software in the next year? How much software do you specify, recommend or approve at your job in a year? Are you really that big of a loss?
It may be fair to a certain extent to be critical of companies that are jumping on the bandwagon late, but I don't think that this is a fair criticism of Corel, as they've been flirting with the Linux market for quite a while. The current WordPerfect 8 for Linux under their own label isn't the first version. I was using WordPerfect 6 years ago, which was a colaborative effort with Caldera.
I would prefer to judge companies on how good their products are, and how well they live up to their promises on product delivery. So far I think Corel stacks up fairly reasonably. I've used WordPerfect 8, and it seems to work fine for me. I've heard both good and bad reports about Corel's Linux distribution, but it is after all, their first real attempt at a distribution, and it will probably get better as it matures. I don't know of any distribution of anything that doesn't have some people complain about it anyway, not Windows, not MacOS, not Solaris, not Red Hat. So time will tell if Corel's distro is a long term player. As for Corel Office 2000, they have at least lived up to their promise to ship it. I hope to get it pretty soon and see how well it works. That will be the real test. I am also waiting for Corel Draw. If they deliver that for Linux, they will have lived up to most if not all of their promises to the Linux community, and that is a pretty good track record for anyone.
Wouldn't a better sign of selling power be if they were disappearing from the shelves, rather than occupying them?
:)
Hard to say they aren't selling, since neither of us have access to CompUSA or Best Buy's inventory system. But I believe that those chains aren't stupid, and products that aren't selling don't stay on their inventory lists for long.
Now, if you're saying that they must be doing well to even have been on the shelf in the first place, I have to note that Microsoft BOB (!) and OS/2 Warp 4 used to be found on store shelves as well.
Those products disappeared from shelves for a different reason, they didn't sell, so they got pulled. Even though they came from large and influential vendors who can afford to pay for shelf space if necessary they disappeared. Linux products don't generally have those advantages, as they typically come from smaller vendors without the kind of huge pocketbooks and influence that IBM and Microsoft have. The number of Linux titles on the shelf at the local stores is increasing, not decreasing. I would guess that this would not be happening if the titles that are there weren't selling.
I agree with you that there aren't as many cheapskates in the Linux world as in the Windows world, but that's because Windows users make up around 95% of the users. In percentage terms, though, I'd peg the percentage of Linux cheapskates as substantially higher than that for WIndows.
I'd have to disagree.
There are no doubt loads of warez kiddies on the Windows side,
It's not just warez-kiddies either, it is a large portion of the home Windows user market, even older, 'churchgoing-godfearing' types I know engage in a fair amount of piracy.
but they end up accounting for a small portion of the total users.
As I said, I don't think warez-kiddies are more than the tip of the iceberg in the Windows piracy world. The difference is that the Microsoft world is currently enough larger that it can bear a lot more losses to piracy than the Linux world can.
On the other hand, you've got to admit that the stereotype of the Linux user isn't all that far from the demeanor of your average warez kiddie.
Oh please. I have to admit nothing of the kind. For one thing, putting significance to stereotypes is a pretty stupid thing to do to begin with. For another thing, most of the Linux users I know are in their late 20's to mid 30's, and are not at all representative of that stereotype. A large portion of the Linux users I know are computer professionals.
I'm of the opinion that there's a good-sized overlap. (Note that I'm not referring to someone who might engage in an offhand license abuse -- the percentages of those are probably high in both camps -- but the type unwilling to pay for anything.
I would believe that there is a small overlap, but I think you are way off base in your judgement of the Linux community. The antics of a overly noisy bunch (that being the warez-kiddies and zealots on both sides) seems to have clouded your judgement, or you are trying to bend reality to fit your pre-formed opinion of how the world is.
I don't know for sure that you can't, but if you can't, that would be a good thing, no? :-) The fact that macro viruses aren't as common for WordPerfect as for Microsoft products is another good reason for me to use WordPerfect even if Microsoft was to do a version of MS-Office for Linux.