I can think of two real simple reasons off the bat. For novice users, they already know the IE UI. Whatever the ease of use of Firefox/Firebird/Phoenix (many novice users will get confused by the name changes) it can never be simpler than something already known. Remember that the user already has IE on their system. If they bump into a problem in Firefox that they know how to deal with in IE, will they: 1) stop what they're doing, and spend time to learn a new UI for a tool that (as far as they can see) does the same as IE, but just frustrated them or 2) switch to IE.
95% of users are likely to do #2. This is simplifying things some, but there is a class of users that are not using Firefox/Mozilla because of UI differences.
For advanced users, many environments require you to have IE. They don't do any filtering, they just have a corporate mandate. You may get hell for installing unauthorized software on your local machine. If you install the IE skin, at least when people walk past your machine, or you have to show someone something on a webpage, they aren't asking for 10 minutes "what browser is this".
One reason that MS dominates in so many fields is it provides excellent migration paths. Wordperfect used to dominate wordprocessing, havign much the same "lock-in" that MS Word now has. Desktop dominance would only go so far in beating this, they also had to deal with the massive amount of documents that already existed. They took many pains to make it easy for a WP user to use word, even details like mimicking what might be small things like white on blue text. Having these open flawlessly in Word (aided by the fact that MS gets to say what apps open what, so.doc files defaulted to Word) people saw they could use Word without any hiccups, and WP has never been the same. Sadly, many open source projects don't realize this. If you want mass use of your code, you need to make it easy to use, and easy to transition from existing similar products.
Sadly, the IE skin for Mozilla isn't being very actively maintained anymore. If you could get something that looks at least passably like IE, you'd have a suprisingly large number of people now able to use Mozilla. One of the few positive uses for skinning, yet people normally just tend to make hideously multicolored stuff with bad UI design.
A few projects do use decimal numbers: Perl used to, so the version before Perl 5.6.0 was something like Perl 5.00503, which would be Perl 5.5.3 in the new system. As an aside, the reason for the weird perl version is the older perls cound't handle a version x.y.z, so they used the x.yyyzz scheme. I'm not so sure if I'm either relieved that he had the forthought for 3 digits in a minor version number, or weirded out that he might make it to version x.100.zz without fixing this. =)
A lot of virus writers say this, they write something pretty nasty, and either post it to a website, or it spreads unexpectedly (I disconnected my NIC, but forgot my dialup and whoof! off to the Net it went). Kind of like leaving a loaded gun around the house in plain sight, but saying "I didn't know someone would touch it!" defense when someone gets shot by accident.
I don't want to get into a flamewar (i think they're silly) but this portion seems a bit misinformed: Yeah. Remind me of one "flaky driver" or "questionable stuff" that was recently added to a stable Linux kernel release. The 2.4 maintainer is EXTREMELY hesitant to include anything new, to the point of frustrating people (see XFS). Linux 2.4 changed its VM subsystem, and its scheduler in the middle of the 2.4 branch. They worked, but the "extremely hesitant to include anything new" label doesn't fit. The fact that these changes worked will little ill effect cause a lot of people not to remember these. Linux 2.4 also shipped with a corruption bug in it's default filesystem (ext3) in a common (though not default) journal mode.
These are not attacks against Linux, I use it at work, have used it for years. Just it does have a different development model. Kindly stop the "my freely developed x86 UNIX workalike is SO much better than your freely developed x86 UNIX workalike" arguments. Very silly, and we have better battles to fight.
... because of poor support for Java/Tomcat,.. Kind of pisses me off about Sun's poor Java support of BSD, especially since the original SunOS was a mild port of Berkely BSD. Lots of big people at sun (including Bill Joy) hacked the BSD kernel back in the day.
I wonder when the first person who doesn't know BSD history to mark this as a troll. I still remember all the dorks modding down IBM PS/2 jokes when the Sony PS2 came out.
Actually, the first Terminator was pretty good with time travel, the best part being where Reese has some cheesy Polaroid of her, and talks about wondering what she was thinking when the shot was taken, and we find later, when the picture is taken, she was thinking of him (OK, so mushy, but still consistent). Terminator II had no problem destroying the timeline, creating a paradox where in the present, they destory the inspiration for teh future, which would send them to the present. I never saw Terminator III, even the thought of a naked Terminatrix couldn't bring me to rent it, so don't know how it's handled.
Did anyone else think of the Simpsons episode (some Halloween special) where Homer goes back in time, and steps on stuff, and changes the future (present)? One path had him in the world where they didn't have a word for doughnuts, so he ran screaming. He left, and then it started raining doughnuts. At the end everything was normal, except his family had lizard tongues. Mmm, raining doughnuts...
IBM: "But... but... Linux r0x0rs! We are teh best! Free software... SCO is teh sux0r... patents are evil... I know you're putting a slasdot poster as a lawyer in the lawsuit, but still it's quite a stretch for an IBM lawyer to say patents are evil. They make nice piles of cash with patents, and that probably would be paying your bills. Funny post though.
They do actually, and in a way I'm not 100% happy with all this mess. I used to work at a small contracting firm outside of Chicago, and we did some work for SCO/Caldera. I've long left, but they got another order from SCO, some extensions on the project we had. Sure, SCO is mismanaged, relied on milking the cash cow until dry until it ran out, then when they realized they should have been coding because some free operating system passed them up, they decided to file suit instead of doing any real engineering, but it's not just going to be McBride getting hurt. And some of my friends will be caught in the crossfire.
I would be one to say that Jesux shall smite this thing you call hell, but there hasn't been much activity on the website in a while. I wonder if they'll ship creationism as their mailer/Outlook replacement, for they surely cannot ship evolution.
I work in a faily large financial firm. We have many users, and the priority is always getting stuff runninf first, getting it running the right way is maybe second, but feels so far removed feels like 3rd or 4th with nothing at second at all. Security is somewhere at 10th or fiteenth. An rm -rf bomb here would trash MUCH more than someone's home directory, would probably cause us a horrible outage for a while. Luckily not all has to be restored from tape, but we'd still be down for what would be millions of dollars, and get nailed by the SEC to boot (we have SEC uptime requirements). Probably millions of dollars here, if it wasn't caught quickly.
From what I understand, SElinux divides the root privileges somewhat. Instead of root being able to do everything, things such as "bind to ports under 1024" "write to any file" are subdivided. By default, you get all (for backwards compatibility) but programs can drop privileges when they need to. In this case, I don't think it would help, the privs are too coarse grained. Even if, say, I removed the ability to remove files, since the installer has to, by definition, write files, I can just truncate or overwrite all files and get pretty much the same result. NetBSD has the ability to restrict syscalls. This might help more, say I can only create new files in/usr/local, and soem other thigns. The trick there is getting the perms permissive enough to allow the install, yet secure enough to stop some of the evil stuff. No curent OS really does this. Maybe some of the stillborn Java OS could, with their security properties, but computers in current use are designed to be very permissive.
If you can restore the Jabba scene in ANH, you can do those too. I think that's a horrible example. The restored Jabba scene was one of the worst things that happened to the "improved" ANH. If you see "the making of", you see the scene was originally shot Han walking around a fat guy. He's able to go around his back from side to side. In the "improved" version, they add a full cgi Jabba, which means for Han to go side to side, he has to jump over his massive tail. Not only would this never happen (do you want to be playing jump rope with a loan shark that wants to kill you) but the way it was acted, Han does a discontinuous jump near vertical, then near horizontal for this to happen. That destroyed the suspension of disbelief for me for that scene, and to some extent the movie. Adding all the little characters and rats running around Tatooine didn't help. It it from a desolate planet where you could see why Skywalker(s) were desperate to get off and seek other things, such as adventure.
Yes Lucas, film technolgy has improved to where enabling your vision is easier, but don't destroy your film in the process. Technology is technology, using it takes skill, not using it seems to take more skill some times. You were able to create a world where a flashtube with some cut windshield wiper blades on the side became the most potent weapon an 8 year old could imagine. You don't need computers to do that.
I'm not an expert, but I don't think so. Most Windows/Outlook viruses still spread by the "lets hide the extension, even though most people would click on a.com or.pif anyway". That can't happen on a Mac. It is possible for an app to hide as a simple document, but that requires more work from the end user and is less likely to happen.
As far as worms go, I hear PowerPC is pretty difficult to code shellcode attacks into stack smashing attacks. More info anyone?
MS likes to say that the ubiquity of their platform is the cause of all the worms. That to some extent is true, but it isn't the whole reason. MS software just has some fundamental flaws in both design and implementation. UNIX is flawed too (you need to be root to do many things, once you're root you can do everything) but a lot of vectors just don't exist.
Slashdot Mirror
I can think of two real simple reasons off the bat. For novice users, they already know the IE UI. Whatever the ease of use of Firefox/Firebird/Phoenix (many novice users will get confused by the name changes) it can never be simpler than something already known. Remember that the user already has IE on their system. If they bump into a problem in Firefox that they know how to deal with in IE, will they:
.doc files defaulted to Word) people saw they could use Word without any hiccups, and WP has never been the same. Sadly, many open source projects don't realize this. If you want mass use of your code, you need to make it easy to use, and easy to transition from existing similar products.
1) stop what they're doing, and spend time to learn a new UI for a tool that (as far as they can see) does the same as IE, but just frustrated them
or
2) switch to IE.
95% of users are likely to do #2. This is simplifying things some, but there is a class of users that are not using Firefox/Mozilla because of UI differences.
For advanced users, many environments require you to have IE. They don't do any filtering, they just have a corporate mandate. You may get hell for installing unauthorized software on your local machine. If you install the IE skin, at least when people walk past your machine, or you have to show someone something on a webpage, they aren't asking for 10 minutes "what browser is this".
One reason that MS dominates in so many fields is it provides excellent migration paths. Wordperfect used to dominate wordprocessing, havign much the same "lock-in" that MS Word now has. Desktop dominance would only go so far in beating this, they also had to deal with the massive amount of documents that already existed. They took many pains to make it easy for a WP user to use word, even details like mimicking what might be small things like white on blue text. Having these open flawlessly in Word (aided by the fact that MS gets to say what apps open what, so
I'll tell you what to do. Go that way. Really fast. If something gets in your way, turn!
4 weeks... twenty papers... two dollars... CASH.
Sadly, the IE skin for Mozilla isn't being very actively maintained anymore. If you could get something that looks at least passably like IE, you'd have a suprisingly large number of people now able to use Mozilla. One of the few positive uses for skinning, yet people normally just tend to make hideously multicolored stuff with bad UI design.
A few projects do use decimal numbers: Perl used to, so the version before Perl 5.6.0 was something like Perl 5.00503, which would be Perl 5.5.3 in the new system.
As an aside, the reason for the weird perl version is the older perls cound't handle a version x.y.z, so they used the x.yyyzz scheme. I'm not so sure if I'm either relieved that he had the forthought for 3 digits in a minor version number, or weirded out that he might make it to version x.100.zz without fixing this. =)
A lot of virus writers say this, they write something pretty nasty, and either post it to a website, or it spreads unexpectedly (I disconnected my NIC, but forgot my dialup and whoof! off to the Net it went). Kind of like leaving a loaded gun around the house in plain sight, but saying "I didn't know someone would touch it!" defense when someone gets shot by accident.
I don't want to get into a flamewar (i think they're silly) but this portion seems a bit misinformed:
Yeah. Remind me of one "flaky driver" or "questionable stuff" that was recently added to a stable Linux kernel release. The 2.4 maintainer is EXTREMELY hesitant to include anything new, to the point of frustrating people (see XFS).
Linux 2.4 changed its VM subsystem, and its scheduler in the middle of the 2.4 branch. They worked, but the "extremely hesitant to include anything new" label doesn't fit. The fact that these changes worked will little ill effect cause a lot of people not to remember these. Linux 2.4 also shipped with a corruption bug in it's default filesystem (ext3) in a common (though not default) journal mode.
These are not attacks against Linux, I use it at work, have used it for years. Just it does have a different development model. Kindly stop the "my freely developed x86 UNIX workalike is SO much better than your freely developed x86 UNIX workalike" arguments. Very silly, and we have better battles to fight.
... because of poor support for Java/Tomcat,..
Kind of pisses me off about Sun's poor Java support of BSD, especially since the original SunOS was a mild port of Berkely BSD. Lots of big people at sun (including Bill Joy) hacked the BSD kernel back in the day.
I wonder when the first person who doesn't know BSD history to mark this as a troll. I still remember all the dorks modding down IBM PS/2 jokes when the Sony PS2 came out.
Interesting note in the article: BEA's stock price recently tanked 23%. Anyone know why?
mixed results in last quarter
Wasn't Lexmark part of IBM, not Xerox?
I seem to remember having an IBM printer, then remembering the division spun out into Lexmark.
Actually, the first Terminator was pretty good with time travel, the best part being where Reese has some cheesy Polaroid of her, and talks about wondering what she was thinking when the shot was taken, and we find later, when the picture is taken, she was thinking of him (OK, so mushy, but still consistent). Terminator II had no problem destroying the timeline, creating a paradox where in the present, they destory the inspiration for teh future, which would send them to the present. I never saw Terminator III, even the thought of a naked Terminatrix couldn't bring me to rent it, so don't know how it's handled.
Did anyone else think of the Simpsons episode (some Halloween special) where Homer goes back in time, and steps on stuff, and changes the future (present)? One path had him in the world where they didn't have a word for doughnuts, so he ran screaming. He left, and then it started raining doughnuts. At the end everything was normal, except his family had lizard tongues. Mmm, raining doughnuts...
IBM: "But... but... Linux r0x0rs! We are teh best! Free software... SCO is teh sux0r... patents are evil...
I know you're putting a slasdot poster as a lawyer in the lawsuit, but still it's quite a stretch for an IBM lawyer to say patents are evil. They make nice piles of cash with patents, and that probably would be paying your bills. Funny post though.
Canon just came out with a new lens that uses Fresnel tech, or at least pseudo Fresnel. See the new 70-300 DO on canon EF lens site
It's no a perfectly flat fresnel, but it does do ladder step stuff to put a 300MM zoom in a failry small package.
They do actually, and in a way I'm not 100% happy with all this mess. I used to work at a small contracting firm outside of Chicago, and we did some work for SCO/Caldera. I've long left, but they got another order from SCO, some extensions on the project we had. Sure, SCO is mismanaged, relied on milking the cash cow until dry until it ran out, then when they realized they should have been coding because some free operating system passed them up, they decided to file suit instead of doing any real engineering, but it's not just going to be McBride getting hurt. And some of my friends will be caught in the crossfire.
Bad BAD typo. I almost had a heart attack when I read it as "The Almighty Bush"
"They misunderestimated me."
-- President of Spam Club
I would be one to say that Jesux shall smite this thing you call hell, but there hasn't been much activity on the website in a while. I wonder if they'll ship creationism as their mailer/Outlook replacement, for they surely cannot ship evolution .
INSERT WITTY BSD DAEMON JOKE HERE
I work in a faily large financial firm. We have many users, and the priority is always getting stuff runninf first, getting it running the right way is maybe second, but feels so far removed feels like 3rd or 4th with nothing at second at all. Security is somewhere at 10th or fiteenth. An rm -rf bomb here would trash MUCH more than someone's home directory, would probably cause us a horrible outage for a while. Luckily not all has to be restored from tape, but we'd still be down for what would be millions of dollars, and get nailed by the SEC to boot (we have SEC uptime requirements). Probably millions of dollars here, if it wasn't caught quickly.
/usr /local, and soem other thigns. The trick there is getting the perms permissive enough to allow the install, yet secure enough to stop some of the evil stuff. No curent OS really does this. Maybe some of the stillborn Java OS could, with their security properties, but computers in current use are designed to be very permissive.
From what I understand, SElinux divides the root privileges somewhat. Instead of root being able to do everything, things such as "bind to ports under 1024" "write to any file" are subdivided. By default, you get all (for backwards compatibility) but programs can drop privileges when they need to. In this case, I don't think it would help, the privs are too coarse grained. Even if, say, I removed the ability to remove files, since the installer has to, by definition, write files, I can just truncate or overwrite all files and get pretty much the same result. NetBSD has the ability to restrict syscalls. This might help more, say I can only create new files in
We were surprised by the amount of people helping others installing after they got linux installed over their own PC's
So the Slashdot effect was avoided by BitTorrent?
Pike, BORK BORK BORK!!
"The best things about universal standards is there are so many to choose from."
-- modified from unattributed quote on Net.
http://www.mindspring.com/~jamoyers/software/color gcc/colorgcc.gif
sorry for any Lameness filter breakage
If you can restore the Jabba scene in ANH, you can do those too.
I think that's a horrible example. The restored Jabba scene was one of the worst things that happened to the "improved" ANH. If you see "the making of", you see the scene was originally shot Han walking around a fat guy. He's able to go around his back from side to side. In the "improved" version, they add a full cgi Jabba, which means for Han to go side to side, he has to jump over his massive tail. Not only would this never happen (do you want to be playing jump rope with a loan shark that wants to kill you) but the way it was acted, Han does a discontinuous jump near vertical, then near horizontal for this to happen. That destroyed the suspension of disbelief for me for that scene, and to some extent the movie. Adding all the little characters and rats running around Tatooine didn't help. It it from a desolate planet where you could see why Skywalker(s) were desperate to get off and seek other things, such as adventure.
Yes Lucas, film technolgy has improved to where enabling your vision is easier, but don't destroy your film in the process. Technology is technology, using it takes skill, not using it seems to take more skill some times. You were able to create a world where a flashtube with some cut windshield wiper blades on the side became the most potent weapon an 8 year old could imagine. You don't need computers to do that.
I'm not an expert, but I don't think so. Most Windows/Outlook viruses still spread by the "lets hide the extension, even though most people would click on a .com or .pif anyway". That can't happen on a Mac. It is possible for an app to hide as a simple document, but that requires more work from the end user and is less likely to happen.
As far as worms go, I hear PowerPC is pretty difficult to code shellcode attacks into stack smashing attacks. More info anyone?
MS likes to say that the ubiquity of their platform is the cause of all the worms. That to some extent is true, but it isn't the whole reason. MS software just has some fundamental flaws in both design and implementation. UNIX is flawed too (you need to be root to do many things, once you're root you can do everything) but a lot of vectors just don't exist.