Actually, one of the things that I like about LaTeX is that it outputs PDF. I can send these PDF files to basically anyone, and chances are they can read it. More importantly, I know that my files will appear on their machine exactly as it appeared on my machine. You never can tell what version of MS Word the person reading your file has, and I have seen too many word documents that have gotten screwed up by a different version of MS Word.
It's simple. Phillips is in the hardware business. They know that most of their customers want to copy CDs, and they figure that they probably can make some money by being the hardware manufacturer to sell a CD player that will copy so called copy-protected CDs.
I know that I would pay extra for a CD player that would allow me to make a backup copy. Wouldn't you?
That's really the beauty of the free enterprise system. As long as their is competition the customer gets what they want at the lowest possible price. Of course, in reality sometimes it's more miss than hit.
Making it more difficult is the entire point. As long as you are actually storing the email addresses on your computer somewhere then the virus could potentially find them. However, you have raised the bar significantly for virus writers, and you have therefore made it much harder for the virus to actually find susceptible hosts for propogation. Getting the users address book in Windows is a one command type deal. Searching the myriad places that a Unix user might put their personal address book is another thing entirely. If I use LDAP for my address book and IMAP to read my mail chances are good that there aren't even any email addresses on my machine. And if the virus writer makes a mistake (say grep outputs some a line his script wasn't expecting), then it's game over the virus won't propogate on that machine and all machines with the same sort of setup.
Computer viruses work in the same way that human viruses do. If enough of the population is immune to the virus, then the virus doesn't spread (even if there are susceptible hosts in the population).
So the question isn't making viruses impossible. Clearly that isn't ever going to happen. The point is to make it more difficult for viruses to spread.
Windows + Outlook has gone out of its way to make email viruses easy to spread, and even so chances are good that a careful Windows user has never been infected. If the average user was even a little bit better protected by his or her operating system and mail client then email viruses could very well cease to exist. Just removing the ability to launch a program by double clicking on the icon would probably see the end of email viruses. If users had to save the file to their hard drive, make the program executable by changing the properties and then double click on it I am sure that most viruses would fail to propogate.
This would work on a system that had a lot of users, but it certainly wouldn't work on a desktop system. Making sure that your shell servers were separate from your imap servers would close this hole up tight. Any user that ran this script (assuming that he or she was dumb enough to run it and yet smart enough to know how) would simply send root a big pile of mail (imagine the LART that user would get). This also assumes that your SMTP server isn't storing its aliases in LDAP somewhere.
The fact of the matter is the number of machines on the Internet where people actively read their mail and also have an/etc/aliases that actually has valid addresses in it is totally small. In fact, even if everyone used Linux on their desktop the number of susceptible hosts would be miniscule. And since/etc/aliases doesn't generally hold a lot of mail addresses from another host (just the admin's, and hopefully he or she isn't entirely clueless) the chances of this virus spreading beyond one host is ridiculously small.
The comparison between this problem and how easy it is to get a users email address list with Outlook is simply laughable.
Or better yet, a virus that only your engine could stop. I imagine that a really virulent fast spreading nasty virus that slid under everyone's radar except for the users of FooBeGone virus protection would be good publicity for FooBeGone.
Absolute security wouldn't be any fun. It would entail turning off the computer, burying it in concrete and firing it off towards the center of the sun. Linux gives the user a great deal of security without being unusable. It's pretty close to the "ideal form" IMHO.
Of course, I am not too paranoid. You might prefer OpenBSD:).
NTFS permissions could do all of this and more. Of course, nearly 90% of the installed Windows base won't read NTFS partitions, and even if you are running a Windows NT based OS, chances are good that you haven't completely locked down the system files, or taken the current directory out of your path, or done all of the other things that would be necessary to make Windows match up to even the least secure Linux install I have ever seen. And if you did lock it down you will almost certainly find that some of your software no longer runs! When Windows NT came out you couldn't even run MS Office without allowing write access to files in the system directories (I am fairly sure that Microsoft at least has cleaned up their act since then).
The theoretical security of Windows is no match for the actual security of even the laxest Linux install.
Texinfo isn't at all limited. In fact, it rocks. It has most of the advantages of LaTeX, it generates beautiful looking html, cross-referenced pdfs, gorgeous postscript, and info files to boot. And the Texinfo-mode for Emacs does most of the tricky bits for you. It builds the menus, makes sure the links all go to the right places, etc. etc.
For computer documentation I personally prefer it over LaTeX (and that's saying a lot).
Imagine you are a virus. Now tell me how exactly are you going to spread using the stuff found in your home directory. Viruses spread by attaching themselves to executables, but I don't have any executables in my home directory, and if I did there is almost no chance that some other user is going to run them. If by some amazing obscure fluke I did have some binaries in my home directory, and I just so happened to mail one of those infected binaries to a friend, even if my friend did run this binary the virus is stuck with the same low chances for infection. It can only infect files that my friend has read access to, and it can only carry out tasks that my friend has permission to do.
In other words such a beast has almost no chance of actually spreading.
Now, someone could send you a malicious email attachment. Something along the lines of:
#!/bin/sh
rm -rf ~/
Of course, this sort of binary has very little chance of getting run. After all, there isn't an email client for Linux that I am aware of that would make this sort of attachment easy to run. You would have to save it to your home directory, set the executable bit, and then run it.
And even if you did run it, how would it spread. It might try and email itself to everyone in your address book, but Linux doesn't have a default address book, nor is it likely to ever have one. Some folks use mutt, others use Pine, Evolution has it's own format, as does Aethera, and for folks like me that use Emacs to read our mail there are several possible places to put our address book.
Windows has a ton of viruses for four basic reasons:
1) There are no sensible file permissions. Users can write to system files.
2) Microsoft has made it easy to do some incredibly stupid things. For example, getting the contents of your address book is dead simple.
3) Microsoft has blended the line between executable content and data. Double clicking on an icon can either launch a program or open a document. Some documents (like MS Word files) can even contain executable content with full access to your system.
4) Microsoft is a ubiquitous mono-culture. A Microsoft exploit has plenty of susceptible victims, making it easier for viruses to spread. Even if someone did write a Linux mail virus, the chance of it working on both my Emacs/Gnus set up and someone else's Evolution setup is highly unlikely. Without enough susceptible victims viruses can't spread.
Even if all of the Joe Sixpacks in the world were running Linux it still would be a good deal less dangerous than what Windows users currently face.
AOL will almost certainly throw their millions of users towards some other system, and web sites will be forced to support both AOL's system or Microsoft's, or neither (they will probably just stick with whatever they are doing now).
Trust me, Microsoft's Passport numbers look impressive, but that's almost entirely due to Hotmail (which Microsoft doesn't charge for). In other words they have a load of crap data, and they are just now trying to get folks to actually associate this information with useable information like credit card numbers. To make matters even more interesting, Microsoft has had several well published security exploits. Only the dimmest of dim bulbs is going to trust Microsoft with their billing information (especially since chances are good that all of the places that they purchase things online already have this information). AOL, on the other hand, already has billing information for each and every one of their customers. They have literally got exactly what they need to make Internet Shopping truly painless.
Better yet, there is at least some chance that AOL will share their Passport equivalent, which will almost certainly spread to other large ISPs.
And finally, every eCommerce site currently in existance already has a way to charge you money. They aren't likely to throw their old software away and change to a.NET only site. Microsoft is the only company I can think of that has a good reason to force paying customers towards.NET.
Re:Economic imbalance is the issue here
on
The Drone War
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· Score: 2
Arafat and the PLO have been walking a fine line for a long time, but my guess is that Arafat's dance is just about over. The Israeli's have nearly gotten to the point where they are willing to completely ignore Arafat as a spokesman for the Palestinians. Unless Arafat can reign in his hounds you can bet that he will quickly become completely irrelevant. Arafat knows this too. Check out this article. He's more than willing to use force against his own people if the alternative is having the Israeli police do it for him.
Besides, the U.S., and most of the rest of the non-Arab world, isn't likely to see suicide bombers as anything but terrorist activity. And if the PLO is unfortunate enough in this present climate to be linked to an attack on American civilians things are likely to become problematic for the PLO and any Arab nation that supports PLO terrorists.
Re:Economic imbalance is the issue here
on
The Drone War
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The "equalizer" (if you want to call it that) here is terrorism -- if civilians here start dying in scores in retaliation... public support for this dries up pretty fast.
Current events are proving this to be an entirely false conclusion. I think that if another large terrorist attach on the U.S. were to happen right now the country that harbored the group responsible would quickly find itself reduced to nothing more than a smoking hole in the ground. Americans had very few problems fire-bombing their enemies in WWII, and they didn't hardly blink when dropping the atomic bombs on Japan. More recently, the Taliban was foolish enough to think that they would be better off harboring terrorists than turning Bin Laden over to the U.S. and they turned out to be 100% wrong.
In light of recent events I think that any leader that values his life is likely to do their best to turn terrorists over to the U.S. if they are asked (most likely they will pretend they are handing them over to the U.N., but the end result is the same).
Without places to hide, terrorist organizations are far less likely to be a serious long term threat.
Yes, for heavy web surfers getting broadband is almost like getting a second phone line. Of course, not many Americans have a second phone line either.
The point that most Slashdotters miss is that for most folks that use the Internet 56K is fast enough. If all you use the Internet for is to check your stocks, read some email, catch some news, balance your checkbook, and do the occasional bit of research then 56K is plenty fast enough. Most of the sites that I visit frequently load nearly as fast at home over my crappy dial-up connection as they do at work with my fractional T-1. Most web sites have done a fairly good job of optimizing their services for dial-up users. I never really have spent much time using the various and sundry file sharing services, but from the articles I have read about Gnutella it would appear that even for a fairly large number of the folks downloading music 56K is fast enough.
Add to that the fact that the broadband means dealing with the bureaucracy of either your cable company or (even worse) your local phone company and it is no wonder that more people haven't gotten on the broadband bandwagon.
Besides, the broadband companies have gone out of their way to make sure that most of the interesting uses of their added bandwidth are banned. You can't run servers, and on many services you can't use a VPN client. When all is said and done the only benefit of broadband over a typical dial-up connection is that you don't have to be nearly as patient when downloading large files. Of course, with the content providers clamping down hard on music and video sharing, there aren't really any large files to download (unless you are a Linux freak and want ISOs of all of the latest distributions). Throw in the fact that most broadband providers seem to have problems maintaining the stability of a service as straightforward (and as critical) as pop3 email and it's a wonder that anyone has a broadband connection.
Until the average file served up over the Internet is big enough that it makes dial-up connections impractical dial-up will continue to dominate the Internet landscape (at least in the U.S.), and that isn't likely to happen until we start seeing more audio and video files.
I personally used to have a broadband connection, but I am back to my dial-up connection. The only real change to my lifestyle was I was forced to write a cron job to apt-get the newest debs from unstable every night at 1:00am.
The slashdot blurb has a link to version 1.0.1 of the LSB test suite.
If you would have read my quote more carefully you would have realized that I actually included the README from that package. They have a test suite in beta. Which basically means that they have a half-baked idea of a way to mostly check to make sure that a binary is LSB compliant. Only the most foolish of companies would actually release a binary package that this suite said was LSB compliant without actually testing on the various and sundry Linux distributions. Not that it would help much anyway. There are still a lot of bugs that could potentially be triggered that aren't checked by the LSB.
Besides, who says that Linux developers want to develop against a BARE MINIMUM. If I create a binary package that uses one of the newer features not found in the LSB, then my package isn't LSB compliant. I could include the necessary libraries statically linked, but that makes my package larger than it needs to be, especially if the libraries I need are already installed on most of the systems that my software will be installed on. Not to mention the fact that many important packages aren't part of the LSB. The LSB doesn't include, for example, a Java virtual machine, nor any of the necessary libraries for important packages like QT, or GTK+ (not too mention KDE or Gnome).
In other words, unless the LSB package you are distributing is a commandline application originally written for the original BSD Unix chances are good that you are either going to have to link a huge pile of libraries statically or include a regular smorgasbord of dependency RPMs. I would bet that most Linux developers expect their distribution to take care of these sorts of things.
This is why many commercial applications are simply tested against RedHat. You can use any of the new features that RedHat has included, testing is greatly simplified, and it is possible to get excellent support. Fortunately for the rest of us (I prefer Debian) if we really want to use a different distribution there really isn't anything stopping us from simply downloading the required libraries and installing them on the distribution of our choice. The fact that the LSB has mostly moved the distributions into being FHS compliant means that at least all of the necessary files will be in more or less the right places.
And that's why the LSB will ultimately fail. It makes the developers lives a lot harder for very little gain. Most folks running commercial software on Linux will be using RedHat, so it makes sense to primarily target RedHat, and the rest of the distributions mostly follow RedHat's lead (for obvious reasons) so there generally isn't a problem.
By that logic the GNU tar maintainer shouldn't have included the -z flag either because you could always pipe the output from tar through gzip. The -E flag for cat was almost certainly added for the same reason that many commandline flags are added to GNU software. It was easy to add, and it makes the software a little easier to use. Why in the world would I want to use sed to put a '$' at the end of the line when I can simply do cat -E?
I also think that the LSB is fundamentally flawed, but not because it specifies GNU software (complete with their various and sundry GNUisms). The LSB is flawed because it isn't self hosting. In other words there really isn't a good way to know that your binary application is LSB compliant. You can't just install the LSB onto some test machine and bang away on it. They are working on a test script that hopefully will eventually allow you to check for compliance but currently the README states:
There is not yet a complete set of official test suites released by
the LSB that can be used for compliance testing. You can download
unoffical development versions of test suites planned to be used in
the future from the beta directory in the directory above.
And if that isn't bad enough, the LSB isn't a particularly exciting platform to port to. Most of the cool new Linux features are not included. Basically the LSB is Linux with all of the joy sucked out. No wonder commercial vendors simply test against RedHat and call it good. It simply doesn't make sense to do anything else.
I certainly agree with you that home users are not likely to migrate en masse to Linux anytime soon. In fact, I think that OpenOffice is much more likely to become a major problem for Microsoft than Linux. Linux's primary advantage for the home user is cost, but home users almost certainly already own a license for Windows. It came with their computer. OpenOffice, on the other hand, would give them nearly all of the functionality of MS Office (and MS Office file compatibility to boot) at a fraction of the cost, and it even runs on Windows.
That, my friend, is likely going to prove a very enticing offer. In fact, I wouldn't be one bit surprised to see major OEMs offering StarOffice pre-loaded. It would be a very straightforward value-add, at a rock bottom price.
I suppose that if I was some kind of masochist I could save the binary file to my hard drive using Emacs/Gnus, chmod +x it, and then fire it up by typing something like./dangerous_executable, but this sort of thing would give even the dimmest of dim bulbs time to think about what they were doing. It also assumes that the system administrator hadn't set up the user's home drive to disallow executables.
IMHO Windows users so far have gotten off fairly easy. Trojans with.pif in their name are so easy to filter that it's a wonder these things work on anyone. A really nasty worm would leverage VBA in a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet. It absolutely amazes me that Microsoft thought that Word needed a programming language with hooks into the operating system. Systems administrators can't reject.doc files out of hand, and if you get a.doc file from your boss chances are good that you are going to open it.
The only user that I blame for these sorts of trojans is the user that chose Outlook as the company standard email client. It's not the folks down in marketing's fault that IS has given them a bazooka, aimed it at their foot, and pulled off the safety. When push comes to shove the only thing that really is easier to do in Outlook is bring down your mail servers.
Good points. Of course, my response had nothing to do with ease of use. The original poster intimated that Linux had these same sorts of problems, and I pointed out that it doesn't.
Personally I think that if the question were spelled out as bluntly as you have said it that many organizations would opt for Linux's slightly lower user-friendliness, and much higher security.
Then again, I think that we are very likely to see StarOffice become popular due to its much lower price. In my opinion Windows, StarOffice, a decent email client that doesn't allow you to launch executables by double clicking, and a good virus scanner hits the sweet spot between usability and security.
Most users would still be able to do all of the stuff they currently do (including run all of their Windows software and open most of their Office documents), and yet they would be infinitely safer from viruses, trojans, and other malware.
Until it comes pre-installed Linux isn't likely to be a good fit for most folks.
I realize that there is some give and take whenever you move a novel to the big screen. That sort of an effort requires a certain creativity all of its own. I don't care if they changed some of the events, I just don't want an entire "re-interpretation." I want a classic story well told.
I didn't call Peter Jackson a hack, I had no idea that he was a writer as well as a director. Apparently he is a very talented fellow. However, I still don't see him improving one of the most popular stories of the 20th century. Fortunately, from what I have heard, he was pretty true to the original story. That bodes well. And from the trailers I have seen the casting and the scenery looks very close to how I imagined it to be. That bodes well.
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Actually, one of the things that I like about LaTeX is that it outputs PDF. I can send these PDF files to basically anyone, and chances are they can read it. More importantly, I know that my files will appear on their machine exactly as it appeared on my machine. You never can tell what version of MS Word the person reading your file has, and I have seen too many word documents that have gotten screwed up by a different version of MS Word.
Uh, more like CD Rom drives seem to have a rather low Mean Time Between Failure. Thanks for playing though.
It's simple. Phillips is in the hardware business. They know that most of their customers want to copy CDs, and they figure that they probably can make some money by being the hardware manufacturer to sell a CD player that will copy so called copy-protected CDs.
I know that I would pay extra for a CD player that would allow me to make a backup copy. Wouldn't you?
That's really the beauty of the free enterprise system. As long as their is competition the customer gets what they want at the lowest possible price. Of course, in reality sometimes it's more miss than hit.
Making it more difficult is the entire point. As long as you are actually storing the email addresses on your computer somewhere then the virus could potentially find them. However, you have raised the bar significantly for virus writers, and you have therefore made it much harder for the virus to actually find susceptible hosts for propogation. Getting the users address book in Windows is a one command type deal. Searching the myriad places that a Unix user might put their personal address book is another thing entirely. If I use LDAP for my address book and IMAP to read my mail chances are good that there aren't even any email addresses on my machine. And if the virus writer makes a mistake (say grep outputs some a line his script wasn't expecting), then it's game over the virus won't propogate on that machine and all machines with the same sort of setup.
Computer viruses work in the same way that human viruses do. If enough of the population is immune to the virus, then the virus doesn't spread (even if there are susceptible hosts in the population).
So the question isn't making viruses impossible. Clearly that isn't ever going to happen. The point is to make it more difficult for viruses to spread.
Windows + Outlook has gone out of its way to make email viruses easy to spread, and even so chances are good that a careful Windows user has never been infected. If the average user was even a little bit better protected by his or her operating system and mail client then email viruses could very well cease to exist. Just removing the ability to launch a program by double clicking on the icon would probably see the end of email viruses. If users had to save the file to their hard drive, make the program executable by changing the properties and then double click on it I am sure that most viruses would fail to propogate.
If you are creating large complex documents you really should take a look at LaTeX. All it takes is 95 minutes.
This would work on a system that had a lot of users, but it certainly wouldn't work on a desktop system. Making sure that your shell servers were separate from your imap servers would close this hole up tight. Any user that ran this script (assuming that he or she was dumb enough to run it and yet smart enough to know how) would simply send root a big pile of mail (imagine the LART that user would get). This also assumes that your SMTP server isn't storing its aliases in LDAP somewhere.
The fact of the matter is the number of machines on the Internet where people actively read their mail and also have an /etc/aliases that actually has valid addresses in it is totally small. In fact, even if everyone used Linux on their desktop the number of susceptible hosts would be miniscule. And since /etc/aliases doesn't generally hold a lot of mail addresses from another host (just the admin's, and hopefully he or she isn't entirely clueless) the chances of this virus spreading beyond one host is ridiculously small.
The comparison between this problem and how easy it is to get a users email address list with Outlook is simply laughable.
Or better yet, a virus that only your engine could stop. I imagine that a really virulent fast spreading nasty virus that slid under everyone's radar except for the users of FooBeGone virus protection would be good publicity for FooBeGone.
Absolute security wouldn't be any fun. It would entail turning off the computer, burying it in concrete and firing it off towards the center of the sun. Linux gives the user a great deal of security without being unusable. It's pretty close to the "ideal form" IMHO.
Of course, I am not too paranoid. You might prefer OpenBSD :).
NTFS permissions could do all of this and more. Of course, nearly 90% of the installed Windows base won't read NTFS partitions, and even if you are running a Windows NT based OS, chances are good that you haven't completely locked down the system files, or taken the current directory out of your path, or done all of the other things that would be necessary to make Windows match up to even the least secure Linux install I have ever seen. And if you did lock it down you will almost certainly find that some of your software no longer runs! When Windows NT came out you couldn't even run MS Office without allowing write access to files in the system directories (I am fairly sure that Microsoft at least has cleaned up their act since then).
The theoretical security of Windows is no match for the actual security of even the laxest Linux install.
Texinfo isn't at all limited. In fact, it rocks. It has most of the advantages of LaTeX, it generates beautiful looking html, cross-referenced pdfs, gorgeous postscript, and info files to boot. And the Texinfo-mode for Emacs does most of the tricky bits for you. It builds the menus, makes sure the links all go to the right places, etc. etc.
For computer documentation I personally prefer it over LaTeX (and that's saying a lot).
Tthe last big Passport hack made the news, as did the recent problems with Windows XP. People notice these things.
Imagine you are a virus. Now tell me how exactly are you going to spread using the stuff found in your home directory. Viruses spread by attaching themselves to executables, but I don't have any executables in my home directory, and if I did there is almost no chance that some other user is going to run them. If by some amazing obscure fluke I did have some binaries in my home directory, and I just so happened to mail one of those infected binaries to a friend, even if my friend did run this binary the virus is stuck with the same low chances for infection. It can only infect files that my friend has read access to, and it can only carry out tasks that my friend has permission to do.
In other words such a beast has almost no chance of actually spreading.
Now, someone could send you a malicious email attachment. Something along the lines of:
#!/bin/sh
rm -rf ~/
Of course, this sort of binary has very little chance of getting run. After all, there isn't an email client for Linux that I am aware of that would make this sort of attachment easy to run. You would have to save it to your home directory, set the executable bit, and then run it.
And even if you did run it, how would it spread. It might try and email itself to everyone in your address book, but Linux doesn't have a default address book, nor is it likely to ever have one. Some folks use mutt, others use Pine, Evolution has it's own format, as does Aethera, and for folks like me that use Emacs to read our mail there are several possible places to put our address book.
Windows has a ton of viruses for four basic reasons:
1) There are no sensible file permissions. Users can write to system files.
2) Microsoft has made it easy to do some incredibly stupid things. For example, getting the contents of your address book is dead simple.
3) Microsoft has blended the line between executable content and data. Double clicking on an icon can either launch a program or open a document. Some documents (like MS Word files) can even contain executable content with full access to your system.
4) Microsoft is a ubiquitous mono-culture. A Microsoft exploit has plenty of susceptible victims, making it easier for viruses to spread. Even if someone did write a Linux mail virus, the chance of it working on both my Emacs/Gnus set up and someone else's Evolution setup is highly unlikely. Without enough susceptible victims viruses can't spread.
Even if all of the Joe Sixpacks in the world were running Linux it still would be a good deal less dangerous than what Windows users currently face.
My guess is that when Symantec says they have received this proof-of-concept virus what they really mean is that they wrote it.
AOL will almost certainly throw their millions of users towards some other system, and web sites will be forced to support both AOL's system or Microsoft's, or neither (they will probably just stick with whatever they are doing now).
Trust me, Microsoft's Passport numbers look impressive, but that's almost entirely due to Hotmail (which Microsoft doesn't charge for). In other words they have a load of crap data, and they are just now trying to get folks to actually associate this information with useable information like credit card numbers. To make matters even more interesting, Microsoft has had several well published security exploits. Only the dimmest of dim bulbs is going to trust Microsoft with their billing information (especially since chances are good that all of the places that they purchase things online already have this information). AOL, on the other hand, already has billing information for each and every one of their customers. They have literally got exactly what they need to make Internet Shopping truly painless.
Better yet, there is at least some chance that AOL will share their Passport equivalent, which will almost certainly spread to other large ISPs.
And finally, every eCommerce site currently in existance already has a way to charge you money. They aren't likely to throw their old software away and change to a .NET only site. Microsoft is the only company I can think of that has a good reason to force paying customers towards .NET.
Arafat and the PLO have been walking a fine line for a long time, but my guess is that Arafat's dance is just about over. The Israeli's have nearly gotten to the point where they are willing to completely ignore Arafat as a spokesman for the Palestinians. Unless Arafat can reign in his hounds you can bet that he will quickly become completely irrelevant. Arafat knows this too. Check out this article. He's more than willing to use force against his own people if the alternative is having the Israeli police do it for him.
Besides, the U.S., and most of the rest of the non-Arab world, isn't likely to see suicide bombers as anything but terrorist activity. And if the PLO is unfortunate enough in this present climate to be linked to an attack on American civilians things are likely to become problematic for the PLO and any Arab nation that supports PLO terrorists.
Current events are proving this to be an entirely false conclusion. I think that if another large terrorist attach on the U.S. were to happen right now the country that harbored the group responsible would quickly find itself reduced to nothing more than a smoking hole in the ground. Americans had very few problems fire-bombing their enemies in WWII, and they didn't hardly blink when dropping the atomic bombs on Japan. More recently, the Taliban was foolish enough to think that they would be better off harboring terrorists than turning Bin Laden over to the U.S. and they turned out to be 100% wrong.
In light of recent events I think that any leader that values his life is likely to do their best to turn terrorists over to the U.S. if they are asked (most likely they will pretend they are handing them over to the U.N., but the end result is the same).
Without places to hide, terrorist organizations are far less likely to be a serious long term threat.
I think that they should name it after the Oracle guy from the article the other day "Hugh Barrass," now that's a funny sounding name!
Yes, for heavy web surfers getting broadband is almost like getting a second phone line. Of course, not many Americans have a second phone line either.
The point that most Slashdotters miss is that for most folks that use the Internet 56K is fast enough. If all you use the Internet for is to check your stocks, read some email, catch some news, balance your checkbook, and do the occasional bit of research then 56K is plenty fast enough. Most of the sites that I visit frequently load nearly as fast at home over my crappy dial-up connection as they do at work with my fractional T-1. Most web sites have done a fairly good job of optimizing their services for dial-up users. I never really have spent much time using the various and sundry file sharing services, but from the articles I have read about Gnutella it would appear that even for a fairly large number of the folks downloading music 56K is fast enough.
Add to that the fact that the broadband means dealing with the bureaucracy of either your cable company or (even worse) your local phone company and it is no wonder that more people haven't gotten on the broadband bandwagon.
Besides, the broadband companies have gone out of their way to make sure that most of the interesting uses of their added bandwidth are banned. You can't run servers, and on many services you can't use a VPN client. When all is said and done the only benefit of broadband over a typical dial-up connection is that you don't have to be nearly as patient when downloading large files. Of course, with the content providers clamping down hard on music and video sharing, there aren't really any large files to download (unless you are a Linux freak and want ISOs of all of the latest distributions). Throw in the fact that most broadband providers seem to have problems maintaining the stability of a service as straightforward (and as critical) as pop3 email and it's a wonder that anyone has a broadband connection.
Until the average file served up over the Internet is big enough that it makes dial-up connections impractical dial-up will continue to dominate the Internet landscape (at least in the U.S.), and that isn't likely to happen until we start seeing more audio and video files.
I personally used to have a broadband connection, but I am back to my dial-up connection. The only real change to my lifestyle was I was forced to write a cron job to apt-get the newest debs from unstable every night at 1:00am.
If you would have read my quote more carefully you would have realized that I actually included the README from that package. They have a test suite in beta. Which basically means that they have a half-baked idea of a way to mostly check to make sure that a binary is LSB compliant. Only the most foolish of companies would actually release a binary package that this suite said was LSB compliant without actually testing on the various and sundry Linux distributions. Not that it would help much anyway. There are still a lot of bugs that could potentially be triggered that aren't checked by the LSB.
Besides, who says that Linux developers want to develop against a BARE MINIMUM. If I create a binary package that uses one of the newer features not found in the LSB, then my package isn't LSB compliant. I could include the necessary libraries statically linked, but that makes my package larger than it needs to be, especially if the libraries I need are already installed on most of the systems that my software will be installed on. Not to mention the fact that many important packages aren't part of the LSB. The LSB doesn't include, for example, a Java virtual machine, nor any of the necessary libraries for important packages like QT, or GTK+ (not too mention KDE or Gnome).
In other words, unless the LSB package you are distributing is a commandline application originally written for the original BSD Unix chances are good that you are either going to have to link a huge pile of libraries statically or include a regular smorgasbord of dependency RPMs. I would bet that most Linux developers expect their distribution to take care of these sorts of things.
This is why many commercial applications are simply tested against RedHat. You can use any of the new features that RedHat has included, testing is greatly simplified, and it is possible to get excellent support. Fortunately for the rest of us (I prefer Debian) if we really want to use a different distribution there really isn't anything stopping us from simply downloading the required libraries and installing them on the distribution of our choice. The fact that the LSB has mostly moved the distributions into being FHS compliant means that at least all of the necessary files will be in more or less the right places.
And that's why the LSB will ultimately fail. It makes the developers lives a lot harder for very little gain. Most folks running commercial software on Linux will be using RedHat, so it makes sense to primarily target RedHat, and the rest of the distributions mostly follow RedHat's lead (for obvious reasons) so there generally isn't a problem.
By that logic the GNU tar maintainer shouldn't have included the -z flag either because you could always pipe the output from tar through gzip. The -E flag for cat was almost certainly added for the same reason that many commandline flags are added to GNU software. It was easy to add, and it makes the software a little easier to use. Why in the world would I want to use sed to put a '$' at the end of the line when I can simply do cat -E?
I also think that the LSB is fundamentally flawed, but not because it specifies GNU software (complete with their various and sundry GNUisms). The LSB is flawed because it isn't self hosting. In other words there really isn't a good way to know that your binary application is LSB compliant. You can't just install the LSB onto some test machine and bang away on it. They are working on a test script that hopefully will eventually allow you to check for compliance but currently the README states:
And if that isn't bad enough, the LSB isn't a particularly exciting platform to port to. Most of the cool new Linux features are not included. Basically the LSB is Linux with all of the joy sucked out. No wonder commercial vendors simply test against RedHat and call it good. It simply doesn't make sense to do anything else.
I certainly agree with you that home users are not likely to migrate en masse to Linux anytime soon. In fact, I think that OpenOffice is much more likely to become a major problem for Microsoft than Linux. Linux's primary advantage for the home user is cost, but home users almost certainly already own a license for Windows. It came with their computer. OpenOffice, on the other hand, would give them nearly all of the functionality of MS Office (and MS Office file compatibility to boot) at a fraction of the cost, and it even runs on Windows.
That, my friend, is likely going to prove a very enticing offer. In fact, I wouldn't be one bit surprised to see major OEMs offering StarOffice pre-loaded. It would be a very straightforward value-add, at a rock bottom price.
From my experience it only takes making an example of one (or perhaps two) vandals before the rest realize that they have better uses for their time.
Chances are good you already have some prime suspects (am I not right), so dig up some evidence.
I suppose that if I was some kind of masochist I could save the binary file to my hard drive using Emacs/Gnus, chmod +x it, and then fire it up by typing something like ./dangerous_executable, but this sort of thing would give even the dimmest of dim bulbs time to think about what they were doing. It also assumes that the system administrator hadn't set up the user's home drive to disallow executables.
IMHO Windows users so far have gotten off fairly easy. Trojans with .pif in their name are so easy to filter that it's a wonder these things work on anyone. A really nasty worm would leverage VBA in a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet. It absolutely amazes me that Microsoft thought that Word needed a programming language with hooks into the operating system. Systems administrators can't reject .doc files out of hand, and if you get a .doc file from your boss chances are good that you are going to open it.
The only user that I blame for these sorts of trojans is the user that chose Outlook as the company standard email client. It's not the folks down in marketing's fault that IS has given them a bazooka, aimed it at their foot, and pulled off the safety. When push comes to shove the only thing that really is easier to do in Outlook is bring down your mail servers.
Good points. Of course, my response had nothing to do with ease of use. The original poster intimated that Linux had these same sorts of problems, and I pointed out that it doesn't.
Personally I think that if the question were spelled out as bluntly as you have said it that many organizations would opt for Linux's slightly lower user-friendliness, and much higher security.
Then again, I think that we are very likely to see StarOffice become popular due to its much lower price. In my opinion Windows, StarOffice, a decent email client that doesn't allow you to launch executables by double clicking, and a good virus scanner hits the sweet spot between usability and security.
Most users would still be able to do all of the stuff they currently do (including run all of their Windows software and open most of their Office documents), and yet they would be infinitely safer from viruses, trojans, and other malware.
Until it comes pre-installed Linux isn't likely to be a good fit for most folks.
I realize that there is some give and take whenever you move a novel to the big screen. That sort of an effort requires a certain creativity all of its own. I don't care if they changed some of the events, I just don't want an entire "re-interpretation." I want a classic story well told.
I didn't call Peter Jackson a hack, I had no idea that he was a writer as well as a director. Apparently he is a very talented fellow. However, I still don't see him improving one of the most popular stories of the 20th century. Fortunately, from what I have heard, he was pretty true to the original story. That bodes well. And from the trailers I have seen the casting and the scenery looks very close to how I imagined it to be. That bodes well.