Linus used to refuse the non-executable stack patch. Scattered discussions make it seem he's opening to it. I see his point that it doesn't prevent all smashes, but it makes it harder. You might as well take what you can get.
Solaris has had this ability since 2.6, but you an bypass this. I'm not so sure you could do this with a remote exploit tho, it seems you may need soem code running locally, so it would help agaisnt remote exploits, but not local.
That's not a valid comparison, because Cancer is not a normal part of living. Corruption is a normal part of society.
Cancver is a normal part of living. In fact, getting sick from cancer isn't that you have cancer cells, is that the normal anti-cancer mechanisms aren't functioning right.
If you don't know, I guess O'Reilly has another book sale...
regexps are a very powerful search/replace tool. One of the reasons Perl is so popular is it has a powerful, easy to use (and by this, I also mean easy to invoke, evry try this in C, yeeesh) regular expression parser. Makes text processing very easy.
If you're learning Perl out of the Camel book, you'll be fine. It has a good explanation of it. Once you see the power of it, you'l like wonder how you got along without it.
UNIX, much like pornography, has gone to a "I know it when I see it" thing.
From the strictest view, one might consider the only UNIX OpenUNIX from Caldera. This is where the UNIX brand name has finally ended up (ATT -> Novell (strangely enough) -> SCO -> caldera). It may die there, caldera's in bad shape. OpenUNIX is changing, becoming very Linux friendly.
Almost all UNIXes (Unices?) have a Linux compatibility layer in the kernel. So Linux is becoming the one all encompassing API, if not the one true UNIX.
UNIX came out of AT & T, back when UNIX was still a research project and they were friendly with educational institutions. BSD was a fork. SVR4 UNIX, the most common "base" variant was basically SVR3 with BSD stuff. FreeBSD/NetBSD takes on the spirit of that work. Is FreeBSD UNIX?
Darwin, The base of MacOS is a Mach Microkernel with FreeBSD/NetBSD. It will be the most distributed "UNIX" ever. Is MacOS UNIX? it's very NeXT based, which was a bastard offshoot.
Linux works like UNIX, has the same design philosophy. Is the only UNIX some folks will ever touch. You have weird hybrids of SVR4/BSDlike systems depending on where Linus and the Distro guys picked and choosed stuff.
I have Cygwin on my Win2000 box. I use a bash shell, have rlogin, gcc tools. Is Win200 Linux? I even have a/proc filesystem, and I print from my WinNT box at work using enscript and lpr because the Solaris machines at work don't have enscript and I don't have root.
Hmm, is POSIX compliance mean UNIX? POSIX was supposed to be the one true UNIX standard. If so than the most POSIX OS is WinNT. MS had a POSIX subsystem, never really worked but was needed to satisfy government regs on OS purchasing. MS WinNT was the only OS ever to get POSIX certified, so it's the one true UNIX, from a point of view.
Don't call folks stupid on things that are just interpretation. I can say OpenUNIX, the *BSD's, or WinNT the only UNIX, depending on what my criterea are. Sayig your interpretation is the only one is just trolling for a flamewar.
The GNU is not a reference to the kernel, but the userland stuff.
When Stallman came out with the idea of GNU, he wanted to revolutionize computing with a new kernel based on a variation of Mach microkernel. It would have, amongst others, a UNIX compatible "server" (as these things are called in microkernels". as he was writing this, he (and others) came up with a bunch of tools. Though they run pretty much everywhere, they are still called the GNU tools (as opposed to the FSF toolchain, which is probably more appropriate). They run on pretty much every version of UNIX or UNIX-like variant out there, also with Cygwin, windows as well. They're the basis for a lot of embedded projects too, which usually don't even have a kernel, much less a UNIX one.
Linux came out, used the GNU toolchain. Stallman wanted what he felt was recognition for the contribution to the Linux product, that it essentially was built with the GNU toolchain. Talked to Linus, who said fine. From what I read, this was a misunderstanding, Linus thought he just meant calling Debian GNU/Linux, since all decisions are very much based on FSF/GNU principles. Stallman now calls every distribution GNU/Linux. Many flamewars have been fought on this.
I was in Poland at the time. In this "2nd world" former communist country and the prophets of gloom and doom, the worst that happpened is that the cabbie ripped me off for a cab ride on Jan 1st 2000. I wasn't that mad, considering he had to be working on a big holiday like that. ATMs worked. Oddly enough, half the ATMs in Paris were out for a few days.
Why in the world would secure browsing be a requirement for third world kids on old PCs?
What, poor kids don't deserve to have Hotmail? Or Yahoo mail?
There are a lot of people in the "Third World". They want services too. My ex-gf was Brazilian. She just got a Pentium 4, and needs secure browsing to do her online banking. You can do things with ATMs there that they're just designing here. Check out www.lavrasnovas.com.br. This is a small town, maybe 100 people (but at least 10 bars, woohoo!), but it's got a web site, with Shockwave.
"The Third World" is a pretty complex, diverse place. I personally hate the term, it has too many connotations of arrogance. But if you do use it, don't lump people all together. Middle class there is a much better life than middle class here.
They started a discussion on MS and Sony. Read it, it comes from a former Microsoft developer
Comparison to signed ActiveX controls
on
The Power of Palladium
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I remember the whole IE ActiveX vs Java wars. MS's view was to get signed code. Java's was to build a sandbox, and if you want to break out of that, then you do the certificate thing, and then you have to let individual items through (allow reading local filles for example, but not write). MS has the bulk to say which one you chose, irrespective of technical superiority.
Relying on 'signatures' to protect you is falso hope. Check on www.microsoft.com, search for "ActiveX Security vulnerability" using ALL keywords. You'll get 100 hits back, and the search cuts off at 100, so I don't know how many there are. Yes, the Java security manager had holes (these holes were eventually plugged). But at least there were limits, like a hole in the dike instead of it collapsing. How many IE holes were because certain ActiveX controls were marked "safe for scripting"? So this ActiveX had the run of the system. The controls are signed, but what's stopping a rogue person from obtaining a certificate ad releasing a bad ActiveX control (or a bad app). I remember someone did this, had a certificate and made code that was a proof of concept (I don't remember, I think he wrote soemthign in teh Run key, and you saw a message every time you started up). I also remember when someone pretended to be from Microsoft and obtained a key? Yeah, MS released a patch invalidating the key, how many folks didn't install the patch? Is there code out there with that key? If they can't even hold on to their keys, how can you trust them?
How do you protect against bugs? Outlook wasn't intended to be malicious, but look what happened. MAJOR design flaws in Outlook, and how it's integrated into the system (a great deal of virus damage can be traced to the fact that Explorer by default doens't show extensions, and Outlook picks this up). Neither was sendmail, how many bugs came from that? OK, sendmail's signed now, I can still root you. Is a signed IIS any less vulnerable to Nimda? Is all the KaZaa spyware gonna get kicked off casue of this? Nahh, it's all gonna be signed.
This is where a sandbox mentality is best. Something like the jail and chroot syscalls. Limit the damage that can be done to the system. Have all syscalls be available to be jailed, something like the security manager in Java. Have IIS be jailed to not be able to use connect() to dial out to other servers, jail the ability to make files anywhere other than a log-root, so it can't make startup files in/etc. Limit the damage it can cause. I forgot the Free-NIX projects that support restricted syscalls.
A big problem with Paladium this it turns people into vertificate validators. How many folks do you know who know how to read a key? It's gonna be either accept all, or accept none, depending on what the default is. And if you accept, you're still making you're system succeptible to bugs and trojan horses.
This just seems, to me anyway, to be Microsoft's way of pushing new software and hardware. I don't see it helping folks much.
OK, so I can classify www.microsoft.com, but what category?
Cults/Occult The cult of Bill is strong in this one my master. Criminal Skills Microsoft has stolen more of my time than you will ever believe. Drugs Many things from there seem to be designed with the aid of drugs Entertainment Ha! IE crashed again and took out my shell, FUNNY!!!! Extreme Prices, yes. Gambling 20-1 Blue Screen of death on next restart... Hate Speech Read the opinions on Sun, or Linux, or MacOS, or Java, or... Humor "We only do things to help our customers, we like innovating, not squelching competition".. Hilarious Investing I Invest too much time in MS crap. Job Search Can i find a job that doesn't require Exchange and Outlook on the desktop? MP3 After the new MS patch erases all of yours, you'll be looking for more. Mature I'll grow old before this works Nude YIKES! A bunch of large gutted psty faced, large gutted engineers, I'd rather look at goatse.cx Politics/Religion Billy has bought a bunch of politicians, and it the cult of MS certainly is a religion. Self Help They sure ain't helping ya. Sports Monitor chucking? Or shotgun blasts (keeping with the Office Space theme) Travel "Calgon, take me away!!!!
No trolls were harmed in the making of this message.
Apple never personally called it OS9, = 7 it was System {5,6,7}, and with 8 and 9, they called in MacOS {8,9}, mostly to version the OS separate from the machines for sales to clone makers.
IBM created the PS/2, they added MicroChannel so they could have something proprietary, and charge for "added value" and not get their ass kicked by clones. Sucks when you're in a commodity market. Maybe that woulda flied in the early days, when IBM was pretty much the main guy, but you can't add it after the fact. People who knew about tech will avoided it because of lack of hardware and drivers. People who didn't avoided it bcause of price. The PS/2 thig is part of their letter/number naming conventions: OS/2, DB/2, OS/400, AS/400...
Eitehr you're a troll, or you've never done any real development.
UML, can't comment on. Never did any. What I can say is that design is important, and shooting from the him on 20million lines of code won't get you very far. If UML helps you design, use UML.
Formal checkins. In large complex projects, you need to be absolutely sure about your units. So many places for things to interact, if you don't have them as solid as you can get it, you'll get so many interaction bugs you'll never get anything done.
Developer time costs $20-40 an hour. Ha, now I know you've never done real programming. Developer wages start maybe at $30/hr (not $20), up to $100/hr at spots. Thats just wages, not benefits, taxes all that stuff. If you have no experience in big projects, don't talk.
Code review Code review is easily the best way of debugging. Study after study find that Code reviews find more bugs per unit of time than any other technique. as side benefits, it also transmits techniques from developer to developer. This comes from developers who want to learn and 1) too shy to ask 2) don't know that there is a better way. I learned something in code reviews, some techniques I never thought of. Can it be a power trip? yeah. CAn it lead to a clash of egos? yeah, but thats up to the review lead to control. A good review lead will keep that in check.
Large, geographically concentrated development teams Not surprisingly, this is the model that Linux and most Open Source software uses They have no option because they can't pay developers, so no chance to get them in a concentrated area. There are plusses and minusses with the concentration. why OSS is phenominally successful compared with any of its proprietary competition Sales? No contest. MS. On what definition of success? Bugs? I've seen some really shitty OSS software. yes, the kernel is high quality, Apache, FreeBSD, others.
I had a contract project, a porting job. The platforms were Win32 (where it originated) UNIX/Linux (our port), Novell, and OS/2. We had the command line version because the Linux GUI core dumped every 5 seconds. But the command line version stull sucked, and of course didn't know shit about line endings. We could script it with some extension mapping to try to do dos2unix/unix2dos, but good luck, cause the command line version wouldn't have any useful exit() values. I have no idea what the Novell and OS/2 guys did.
Joel Spolsky (he's been on here before) wrote about sucky SourceSafe a bit and how Microsoft really doesn't use it. Doens't give me a lot of confidence using it. He also had the link to the UseNix verion of the talk given in the story.
The story gives the impression that setup.exe is for the XServer only, but it gets you the whole toolkit. You can pick and choose what you need.
Also, Cygnus is no longer an independant company. They got bought out by RedHat some time ago. See http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/.
I've been running cygwin for years. My job is a UNIX shop and the MKS toolkit just wasn't cutting it. It's come a long way, now I can do pretty much anything I need. I have Perl with Tk extensions, a decent Bash shell, grep, sed, and all their friends. It makes the command shell actually usable. I have my bash shell with the current diretory in the title bar just like on good ol' UNIX. The cygwin shell is ANSI escape code compliant. Then you have stuff like cygutils package, including cygrun, that integrate the cygwin environment with Windows.
XWin has been actually available as beta for a while, a few years I remember. But it was not available in the main download, didn't take advantage of GDI, was kind of unstable, just looked like, well, beta software. Glad they polished it. I'll look at it again. It took them a lot of effort to get it to this state, I congratulate them
And we had the Lego mathematical models a few days ago, anyone can click Legos. He did it cause it was cool, and thought the community at large would like it. And it's on Slashdot cause using a game machine for doing real work is kinda cool to a geek.
I think you mean jerry-rigged, not jerrymandered. Jerrymandering is when you create strange oddly shaped voting districts just to favor one candidate over the other.
Slashdot Mirror
Linus used to refuse the non-executable stack patch. Scattered discussions make it seem he's opening to it. I see his point that it doesn't prevent all smashes, but it makes it harder. You might as well take what you can get.
Solaris has had this ability since 2.6, but you an bypass this. I'm not so sure you could do this with a remote exploit tho, it seems you may need soem code running locally, so it would help agaisnt remote exploits, but not local.
That's not a valid comparison, because Cancer is not a normal part of living. Corruption is a normal part of society.
Cancver is a normal part of living. In fact, getting sick from cancer isn't that you have cancer cells, is that the normal anti-cancer mechanisms aren't functioning right.
Wow, we use some tomcat at work, and I'm surprised as hell by those. I always assumed mod_perl was a memory hog.
I wonder why they didn't include JBoss or WebLogic? WebLogic, I can understand - expen$ive... but JBoss is free, it's on sourceforge.
BTW: This comment is echoing in a very empty room...
An A/C posts a rumor, and it's modded up to 3?
If you don't know, I guess O'Reilly has another book sale...
regexps are a very powerful search/replace tool. One of the reasons Perl is so popular is it has a powerful, easy to use (and by this, I also mean easy to invoke, evry try this in C, yeeesh) regular expression parser. Makes text processing very easy.
If you're learning Perl out of the Camel book, you'll be fine. It has a good explanation of it. Once you see the power of it, you'l like wonder how you got along without it.
You had 1's and 0's? We had to take our 1's and bend them to make 0's..
(apologies to Scott adams/Dilbert)
Check out your local Spanish TV. Some of the novelas already have this. It is annoying.
Linux is not a UNIX. Get used to it.
/proc filesystem, and I print from my WinNT box at work using enscript and lpr because the Solaris machines at work don't have enscript and I don't have root.
UNIX, much like pornography, has gone to a "I know it when I see it" thing.
From the strictest view, one might consider the only UNIX OpenUNIX from Caldera. This is where the UNIX brand name has finally ended up (ATT -> Novell (strangely enough) -> SCO -> caldera). It may die there, caldera's in bad shape. OpenUNIX is changing, becoming very Linux friendly.
Almost all UNIXes (Unices?) have a Linux compatibility layer in the kernel. So Linux is becoming the one all encompassing API, if not the one true UNIX.
UNIX came out of AT & T, back when UNIX was still a research project and they were friendly with educational institutions. BSD was a fork. SVR4 UNIX, the most common "base" variant was basically SVR3 with BSD stuff. FreeBSD/NetBSD takes on the spirit of that work. Is FreeBSD UNIX?
Darwin, The base of MacOS is a Mach Microkernel with FreeBSD/NetBSD. It will be the most distributed "UNIX" ever. Is MacOS UNIX? it's very NeXT based, which was a bastard offshoot.
Linux works like UNIX, has the same design philosophy. Is the only UNIX some folks will ever touch. You have weird hybrids of SVR4/BSDlike systems depending on where Linus and the Distro guys picked and choosed stuff.
I have Cygwin on my Win2000 box. I use a bash shell, have rlogin, gcc tools. Is Win200 Linux? I even have a
Hmm, is POSIX compliance mean UNIX? POSIX was supposed to be the one true UNIX standard. If so than the most POSIX OS is WinNT. MS had a POSIX subsystem, never really worked but was needed to satisfy government regs on OS purchasing. MS WinNT was the only OS ever to get POSIX certified, so it's the one true UNIX, from a point of view.
Don't call folks stupid on things that are just interpretation. I can say OpenUNIX, the *BSD's, or WinNT the only UNIX, depending on what my criterea are. Sayig your interpretation is the only one is just trolling for a flamewar.
The GNU is not a reference to the kernel, but the userland stuff.
When Stallman came out with the idea of GNU, he wanted to revolutionize computing with a new kernel based on a variation of Mach microkernel. It would have, amongst others, a UNIX compatible "server" (as these things are called in microkernels". as he was writing this, he (and others) came up with a bunch of tools. Though they run pretty much everywhere, they are still called the GNU tools (as opposed to the FSF toolchain, which is probably more appropriate). They run on pretty much every version of UNIX or UNIX-like variant out there, also with Cygwin, windows as well. They're the basis for a lot of embedded projects too, which usually don't even have a kernel, much less a UNIX one.
Linux came out, used the GNU toolchain. Stallman wanted what he felt was recognition for the contribution to the Linux product, that it essentially was built with the GNU toolchain. Talked to Linus, who said fine. From what I read, this was a misunderstanding, Linus thought he just meant calling Debian GNU/Linux, since all decisions are very much based on FSF/GNU principles. Stallman now calls every distribution GNU/Linux. Many flamewars have been fought on this.
If the chute doesn't open, yes, it will be.
I was in Poland at the time. In this "2nd world" former communist country and the prophets of gloom and doom, the worst that happpened is that the cabbie ripped me off for a cab ride on Jan 1st 2000. I wasn't that mad, considering he had to be working on a big holiday like that. ATMs worked. Oddly enough, half the ATMs in Paris were out for a few days.
Why in the world would secure browsing be a requirement for third world kids on old PCs?
What, poor kids don't deserve to have Hotmail? Or Yahoo mail?
There are a lot of people in the "Third World". They want services too. My ex-gf was Brazilian. She just got a Pentium 4, and needs secure browsing to do her online banking. You can do things with ATMs there that they're just designing here. Check out www.lavrasnovas.com.br. This is a small town, maybe 100 people (but at least 10 bars, woohoo!), but it's got a web site, with Shockwave.
"The Third World" is a pretty complex, diverse place. I personally hate the term, it has too many connotations of arrogance. But if you do use it, don't lump people all together. Middle class there is a much better life than middle class here.
They started a discussion on MS and Sony. Read it, it comes from a former Microsoft developer
I remember the whole IE ActiveX vs Java wars. MS's view was to get signed code. Java's was to build a sandbox, and if you want to break out of that, then you do the certificate thing, and then you have to let individual items through (allow reading local filles for example, but not write). MS has the bulk to say which one you chose, irrespective of technical superiority.
/etc. Limit the damage it can cause. I forgot the Free-NIX projects that support restricted syscalls.
Relying on 'signatures' to protect you is falso hope. Check on www.microsoft.com, search for "ActiveX Security vulnerability" using ALL keywords. You'll get 100 hits back, and the search cuts off at 100, so I don't know how many there are. Yes, the Java security manager had holes (these holes were eventually plugged). But at least there were limits, like a hole in the dike instead of it collapsing. How many IE holes were because certain ActiveX controls were marked "safe for scripting"? So this ActiveX had the run of the system. The controls are signed, but what's stopping a rogue person from obtaining a certificate ad releasing a bad ActiveX control (or a bad app). I remember someone did this, had a certificate and made code that was a proof of concept (I don't remember, I think he wrote soemthign in teh Run key, and you saw a message every time you started up). I also remember when someone pretended to be from Microsoft and obtained a key? Yeah, MS released a patch invalidating the key, how many folks didn't install the patch? Is there code out there with that key? If they can't even hold on to their keys, how can you trust them?
How do you protect against bugs? Outlook wasn't intended to be malicious, but look what happened. MAJOR design flaws in Outlook, and how it's integrated into the system (a great deal of virus damage can be traced to the fact that Explorer by default doens't show extensions, and Outlook picks this up). Neither was sendmail, how many bugs came from that? OK, sendmail's signed now, I can still root you. Is a signed IIS any less vulnerable to Nimda? Is all the KaZaa spyware gonna get kicked off casue of this? Nahh, it's all gonna be signed.
This is where a sandbox mentality is best. Something like the jail and chroot syscalls. Limit the damage that can be done to the system. Have all syscalls be available to be jailed, something like the security manager in Java. Have IIS be jailed to not be able to use connect() to dial out to other servers, jail the ability to make files anywhere other than a log-root, so it can't make startup files in
A big problem with Paladium this it turns people into vertificate validators. How many folks do you know who know how to read a key? It's gonna be either accept all, or accept none, depending on what the default is. And if you accept, you're still making you're system succeptible to bugs and trojan horses.
This just seems, to me anyway, to be Microsoft's way of pushing new software and hardware. I don't see it helping folks much.
Can't wait til Cyberdyne Model 101 comes out.
I just wanted to let anyone who happened to order from them know about this. Your credit card info could very well be compromised."
And with Microsoft's history of security, the whole tying of Visa to Passport will be just as secure.
OK, so I can classify www.microsoft.com, but what category?
Cults/Occult
The cult of Bill is strong in this one my master.
Criminal Skills
Microsoft has stolen more of my time than you will ever believe.
Drugs
Many things from there seem to be designed with the aid of drugs
Entertainment
Ha! IE crashed again and took out my shell, FUNNY!!!!
Extreme
Prices, yes.
Gambling
20-1 Blue Screen of death on next restart...
Hate Speech
Read the opinions on Sun, or Linux, or MacOS, or Java, or...
Humor
"We only do things to help our customers, we like innovating, not squelching competition".. Hilarious
Investing
I Invest too much time in MS crap.
Job Search
Can i find a job that doesn't require Exchange and Outlook on the desktop?
MP3
After the new MS patch erases all of yours, you'll be looking for more.
Mature
I'll grow old before this works
Nude
YIKES! A bunch of large gutted psty faced, large gutted engineers, I'd rather look at goatse.cx
Politics/Religion
Billy has bought a bunch of politicians, and it the cult of MS certainly is a religion.
Self Help
They sure ain't helping ya.
Sports
Monitor chucking? Or shotgun blasts (keeping with the Office Space theme)
Travel
"Calgon, take me away!!!!
No trolls were harmed in the making of this message.
Apple never personally called it OS9, = 7 it was System {5,6,7}, and with 8 and 9, they called in MacOS {8,9}, mostly to version the OS separate from the machines for sales to clone makers.
IBM created the PS/2, they added MicroChannel so they could have something proprietary, and charge for "added value" and not get their ass kicked by clones. Sucks when you're in a commodity market. Maybe that woulda flied in the early days, when IBM was pretty much the main guy, but you can't add it after the fact. People who knew about tech will avoided it because of lack of hardware and drivers. People who didn't avoided it bcause of price. The PS/2 thig is part of their letter/number naming conventions: OS/2, DB/2, OS/400, AS/400...
The proper care and feeding of trolls...
Eitehr you're a troll, or you've never done any real development.
UML, can't comment on. Never did any. What I can say is that design is important, and shooting from the him on 20million lines of code won't get you very far. If UML helps you design, use UML.
Formal checkins. In large complex projects, you need to be absolutely sure about your units. So many places for things to interact, if you don't have them as solid as you can get it, you'll get so many interaction bugs you'll never get anything done.
Developer time costs $20-40 an hour. Ha, now I know you've never done real programming. Developer wages start maybe at $30/hr (not $20), up to $100/hr at spots. Thats just wages, not benefits, taxes all that stuff. If you have no experience in big projects, don't talk.
Code review Code review is easily the best way of debugging. Study after study find that Code reviews find more bugs per unit of time than any other technique. as side benefits, it also transmits techniques from developer to developer. This comes from developers who want to learn and 1) too shy to ask 2) don't know that there is a better way. I learned something in code reviews, some techniques I never thought of.
Can it be a power trip? yeah. CAn it lead to a clash of egos? yeah, but thats up to the review lead to control. A good review lead will keep that in check.
Large, geographically concentrated development teams
Not surprisingly, this is the model that Linux and most Open Source software uses
They have no option because they can't pay developers, so no chance to get them in a concentrated area. There are plusses and minusses with the concentration.
why OSS is phenominally successful compared with any of its proprietary competition
Sales? No contest. MS.
On what definition of success? Bugs? I've seen some really shitty OSS software. yes, the kernel is high quality, Apache, FreeBSD, others.
If you think Visual SourceSafe is bad...
I had a contract project, a porting job. The platforms were Win32 (where it originated) UNIX/Linux (our port), Novell, and OS/2. We had the command line version because the Linux GUI core dumped every 5 seconds. But the command line version stull sucked, and of course didn't know shit about line endings. We could script it with some extension mapping to try to do dos2unix/unix2dos, but good luck, cause the command line version wouldn't have any useful exit() values. I have no idea what the Novell and OS/2 guys did.
Joel Spolsky (he's been on here before) wrote about sucky SourceSafe a bit and how Microsoft really doesn't use it. Doens't give me a lot of confidence using it. He also had the link to the UseNix verion of the talk given in the story.
He puts a seemingly valid mailto: link on a heavily trafficed website. If it wasn't his "former boss" before, it damn well will be now.
The story gives the impression that setup.exe is for the XServer only, but it gets you the whole toolkit. You can pick and choose what you need.
Also, Cygnus is no longer an independant company. They got bought out by RedHat some time ago. See http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/.
I've been running cygwin for years. My job is a UNIX shop and the MKS toolkit just wasn't cutting it. It's come a long way, now I can do pretty much anything I need. I have Perl with Tk extensions, a decent Bash shell, grep, sed, and all their friends. It makes the command shell actually usable. I have my bash shell with the current diretory in the title bar just like on good ol' UNIX. The cygwin shell is ANSI escape code compliant. Then you have stuff like cygutils package, including cygrun, that integrate the cygwin environment with Windows.
XWin has been actually available as beta for a while, a few years I remember. But it was not available in the main download, didn't take advantage of GDI, was kind of unstable, just looked like, well, beta software. Glad they polished it. I'll look at it again. It took them a lot of effort to get it to this state, I congratulate them
it's that easy.
Read his announcement, it was non-trivial.
And we had the Lego mathematical models a few days ago, anyone can click Legos. He did it cause it was cool, and thought the community at large would like it. And it's on Slashdot cause using a game machine for doing real work is kinda cool to a geek.
but it was jerrymandered into it.
I think you mean jerry-rigged, not jerrymandered. Jerrymandering is when you create strange oddly shaped voting districts just to favor one candidate over the other.
Note her lack of appearance in any Kevin Smith movies after "Dogma"
Yeah, Smith must hate George Carlin too...
I don't get this post, I know K. Smith likes reusing actors, but I don't think he ever made this a necessity.