Re:They're Trying So Hard...
on
Linux Virus Alert
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Oh yeah, it'd be dead simple to entice users to download a binary as root and run it.
Yes, very simple.
"Check out this cool theme! Just run install.sh." Then the installer then says "you must be root to install this theme, please enter password:". Now before you even know you are rooted it's scanning your address book for other victims.
What? You say you're not that stupid? Fine. While you're laughing at everyone else getting slammed by such as transparent trick, remember that the people maintaining the site where you grab your "trusted" binaries from might be one of them.
The only really secure solution is extreme paranoia.
If people are going to downloading the uploaded software, then not scanning it for virii (trojans or anything else for that matter) is completely irresponsible.
I now know not to trust Sourceforge anymore. If I don't have the time to audit the code I won't download it.
I like science fiction. Unfortunately so many directors and producers figure that they can dump all the rules for making good movies just because the current flick is science fiction. They can get away with it because most people go into a scifi movie expecting cool effects and not much more.
Take your average scifi movie and take out the scifi and the effects. It sucks rocks! Ditto for Supernova and Event Horizon. I haven't seen Imposter, but I suspect that if were translated into a non-scifi fugitive movie it would be average.
Some of the best scifi movies delved deep into motivations, character development, basic human themes, etc., but did so in a way that only true scifi can do. Prime examples are Forbidden Planet and Blade Runner.
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.
You completely missed the point. Standards need to be lowest common denominator. Having a -z flag in GNU tar is damn useful. But it should not be the standard.
There are standards for most Unix utilities, and those standards should have been used instead of the mandating the GNU extensions.
You didn't say they were but that is what is implied, why?
I didn't mean to imply that all objects are metaphors, but I hoped to imply that using metaphors is a valid and useful means to determine what the objects are in your domain.
Programmers need to learn that objects are not metaphors!
Maybe a better way to put this is that object are not ONLY metaphors. But objects as metaphors is a good starting point for OO Analysis. Your domain is full of objects. Some of those objects will be suitable for classes. Many of them won't. That why you do the analysis. In terms of the airfoil example, an airfoil as an object in the domain *may* be suitable for an OO class. But maybe not. But it's the best place to start looking. Perhaps an airfoil would be better represented as a collection of surface objects.
Using objects as metaphors is "top down" analysis. Using the base data structures to build objects from is "bottom up" analysis. Neither is wrong.
The comment got modded up to funny, but it's dead on the mark. OO Programming is about O (Objects). When designing a program, first determine the objects in your domain. The stuff you specifically mentioned are not objects. If you can't find any objects in your domain, then don't go the OO route.
Here's an example: Airfoil design. The object in the domain is the airfoil (and probably composed of other objects like surfaces, sections, etc). The actual equations used are not the object, they are what you do with the object. So when you talk about finite difference solutions, fluid dynamics, and iterative solutions, you aren't talking about objects, but what you can do WITH objects.
Even if OO doesn't fit your domain, take a look at the STL and Generic Programming in general. There's some useful stuff in there for your needs.
The GNU versions of the basic Unix tools are larger than the BSD versions, primarily because they add a whole bunch of functionality. That's good if you have the space. But it's not good if you're in an embedded or tiny environment.
One BSD tool worth having (off the top of my head as an example): sh. Plain old sh. On my current system sh is 34K and bash is 388K. Big difference. Guess which shell I want on my rescue disk? In addition, even if bash is your primary shell (as it is mine), it still pays to make sure your shell scripts are bourne compatible. Then if you have sh on your system, instead of merely a symlink to bash, you'll use fewer resources running them. For a busy server or a slow machine it can make a noticable difference.
BSD has contributed so little outside of its little world.
It's time for YOU to wake up and smell the coffee. Sendmail, BIND, vi, TCP/IP, lpd, Berkeley DB, etc.
Many BSD tools are better than the equivalent GNU tools. And many GNU tools are better than the equivalent from BSD. It all depends on what you want.
I don't know about OpenBSD, but many of the standard default tools for FreeBSD *are* from GNU. The converse situation (BSD tools in a Linux distro) is virtually nil. I suspect that the GNU advocates are the ones that can't abide foreign tools.
I mean, it's a motivational email to (presumably) a bunch of sales wonks, encouraging them to try and sell their products. Gasp, call the Justice Department.
Yes, call the DoJ! As has been repeatedly told to me in the past (in vitriolic ways), Microsoft is a monopoly and must follow *different* rules than mon-monopolies do. Just because it is legal, ethical and moral for your or I to motivate out sales force, does not mean that it is legal, ethical or moral for Microsoft to do so.
They must be accountable to different standards! The DoJ must forbid them from motivating their employees.
In the GNU world, yes. But so what? So is fortran, ada, objective C, java, and every other language that gcc supports.
If C++ compilers were standard on all Unix platforms, then it would make sense to write a compiler in C++. But a lot of platforms don't. I don't see how you could bootstrap a C++ compiler written in C++ using only the default C compiler. Compilers aren't written in C because C is better than C++, but rather because C is the lowest common denominator language on Unix.
Why can't you have a nice toolkit written in C that uses a nice clean OO-like interface?
GTK+ is a nice toolkit. But it stretches things quite a bit to call its OO interface "clean".
Using object oriented programming techniques in C is not a sign of delusion, it's an attempt to do more with less.
You can always do more with less. So why not write your OO program in assember? Just because I can build a house armed with only a screwdriver does not mean that's the way it should be done. I have only myself to blame if my neighbors think me delusional for hammering, sawing and spackling with only a screwdriver, especially when my toolbox includes hammers, saws and putty knives.
There are some OO like things you can do in C easily. But most of them are very difficult. It's not worth the effort when you can do the very same thing, and more, with a real OO language. C++ may not be the perfect OO language, but I would rather hammer in nails with an imperfect hammer than with an elegant screwdriver.
This is the nice property of open source - software doesn't die unless everyone loses interest in it
The corollary being that as long as people have interest in it, it will remain? Funny, the same thing happens with closed source software as well.
Windows 95 isn't dead because people still have interest in it. Only it's name changed. Now it's Win98SE and WinME. What? You meant that Microsoft no longer supports Win95? Well duh! And neither does Redhat support their 4.2 version.
I think either your brain or your dictionary has turned to mush. Take a look at the definition of "civil liberty":
freedom from arbitrary governmental interference (as with the right of free speech) specifically by denial of governmental power and in the U.S. especially as guaranteed by the Bill of Rights
To deny the citizenry the right to own firearms and to pray in school is to repudiate one fifth of the Bill of Rights, impose increased governmental interfence, and increase governmental power. That the ACLU is against these rights only means that they cannot be civil libertarians.
The right of the fetus is a debatable issue, but for those that believe that the Bill of Rights applies to all human beings regardless of birth status, the conclusion is obvious. I find it ironic however that the ACLU would defend the right of the KKK to march in Skokie, but doesn't want a prolifer within fifty feet of an abortion clinic.
And as for the current proposals for national security, those aren't conservative at all! Bush stopped being a conservative the instant he announced a department of Homeland Security, and congressional Democrats didn't suddenly switch sides when they rammed through the federalisation of airport security.
Just because they don't defend all civil liberties, it doesn't mean that they aren't defending some very important ones.
They may be defending some important civil liberties, but they aren't even close to defending the top ten most important civil liberties. It seems to me that they stopped halfway through the first one.
There are no christian conservatives in the KKK. Stop listening to the liberal mainstream press.
Christian: one who holds that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior, and is a Jew. The New Testament was written by Jews who were practicing Jews while they wrote it. The KKK hates Jews. They hate Jews so much that they created their own church in which they heavily edited the Bible. Their religion is a cult.
Conservative: (in the political sense applied to the US, where the KKK reside) one who believes in limited government. The men of the past who defined what conservatism means were against the KKK. Of all the current crop of conservative talk show hosts, two of which were mentioned earlier in the thread, none are sympathetic in any way to the KKK or the idea of White Supremacy. The KKK's politics are much closer to that of the National Socialist party. At the best they are angry populists. They want a large, intrusive government for everyone not of their race.
You can't find a more hardcore group of christian conservatives than the John Birch Society. The JBS hates the KKK. You need to figure out just what the KKK is before you start throwing that label at people who don't follow your particular political persuasion.
Except for those times that the ACLU defended the KKK's right to protest
How insulting can you be! The poster complained of the liberal and anti-christian bent of the ACLU and you respond with the KKK. For your information, the KKK is NOT representative of conservatives or christians.
The ACLU is all for certain clauses in the First Amendment. For the remaining clauses, they are either ignored or twisted out of recognition. Regarding the Second Amendment, I doubt most members of the ACLU even know it exists.
It's time for those who truly understand what civil liberties are to abandon the organization that abandoned civil liberties.
it only seems to be behind if you use Debian stable
Perhaps the bleeding edge Debian gets released just as fast as all the other distros, but but stable Debian is what counts. If Debian unstable is supposed to be the mainline branch, then why is it called "unstable"?
Debian stable is what counts, and I expect quicker results from a constipated tortoise than from Debian stable.
I'm not sure it's a joke. It's the same old story that been around for twenty years. Go peruse the software shelves and see how many of this weeks titles won't run on last years state-of-the-art systems.
Everytime I run across a slow or sluggish program the solution is always to get a faster machine. Perhaps a 1.2Ghz Athlon is obsolete. If so, then my 1.33Ghz Athlon must be obsolete as well, or will be by the end of the week. Well screw it! I'm tired of chasing after other people's standards. If the software won't run on my system it's cheaper not to buy that software than to upgrade the CPU.
I'll leave it to the zealots to argue whether this is a win for KDE's superior integration or GNOME's modularity...
It's neither. It's simply that there's more GTK+ applications available than Qt applications. Remember that GTK+ was a thriving toolkit before GNOME ever got thought of, but no one ever used Qt much until KDE came about.
This issue isn't KDE vs GNOME, but Qt versus GTK+. Looking at the toolkits, one sees that Qt objects are constructed through inheritance while GTK+ objects are constructed through composition. There are advantages and disadvantages to both. Translated to a higher level, GNOME is composed of GTK+ while KDE is inherited from Qt.
It's not a matter of KDE vs GNOME, but of composition versus inheritance. Composition leads to greater modularity while inheritance leads to greater cohesiveness (integration).
I tried FreeBSD two years ago, and it subsequently became my primary OS. On the topic of lo-fat desktops, most distros can be made lo-fat. But in my mind, FreeBSD makes it easiest to keep that fat off while still keeping muscle tone.
The biggest advantage to FreeBSD for me is not it's lo-fat-ness, but the fact that I get to be in sole control of my system without having to work very hard at it. For instance, I use an Athlon so I want everything optimized for the Athlon. I can rebuilt everything under Redhat, Debian or Slackware for Athlon optimization, but it's a major pain in the butt. With FreeBSD it's two simple steps, one for the base system, and one for all the packages.
People by organic tomatoes because they are tomatoes, not because they aren't radishes. A tomato is no substitute for a radish. When people choose Linux solely because it isn't Windows, they are asserting that one is a valid subtitute for the other.
I know many Jews who follow a kosher diet. Pork is forbidden to them. Yet I know some who find nothing wrong with fake ham made from turkey. I find this ridiculous. It may be a suitable substitute when drowned in mayonnaise and mustard, but why would a Jew want a ham substitute anyway? I don't want to get into any theological discussions, so don't bother answering that last question. Choosing Linux just because it isn't Windows is like using turkey-ham for instead of real ham. I don't want ham. I want a roast beef sandwich. I don't want a ham sandwich that doesn't have real ham in it. Yet all I hear from the Linux community is that their favorite kosher OS needs to be more like that forbidden pork butt.
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Oh yeah, it'd be dead simple to entice users to download a binary as root and run it.
Yes, very simple.
"Check out this cool theme! Just run install.sh." Then the installer then says "you must be root to install this theme, please enter password:". Now before you even know you are rooted it's scanning your address book for other victims.
What? You say you're not that stupid? Fine. While you're laughing at everyone else getting slammed by such as transparent trick, remember that the people maintaining the site where you grab your "trusted" binaries from might be one of them.
The only really secure solution is extreme paranoia.
If people are going to downloading the uploaded software, then not scanning it for virii (trojans or anything else for that matter) is completely irresponsible.
I now know not to trust Sourceforge anymore. If I don't have the time to audit the code I won't download it.
I like science fiction. Unfortunately so many directors and producers figure that they can dump all the rules for making good movies just because the current flick is science fiction. They can get away with it because most people go into a scifi movie expecting cool effects and not much more.
Take your average scifi movie and take out the scifi and the effects. It sucks rocks! Ditto for Supernova and Event Horizon. I haven't seen Imposter, but I suspect that if were translated into a non-scifi fugitive movie it would be average.
Some of the best scifi movies delved deep into motivations, character development, basic human themes, etc., but did so in a way that only true scifi can do. Prime examples are Forbidden Planet and Blade Runner.
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.
You completely missed the point. Standards need to be lowest common denominator. Having a -z flag in GNU tar is damn useful. But it should not be the standard.
There are standards for most Unix utilities, and those standards should have been used instead of the mandating the GNU extensions.
No, Bill was the overpriced and skinny pony purchasd from Bill Ferny. I think you're thinking of Fatty Lumpkin, which was Tom's pony.
You didn't say they were but that is what is implied, why?
I didn't mean to imply that all objects are metaphors, but I hoped to imply that using metaphors is a valid and useful means to determine what the objects are in your domain.
Programmers need to learn that objects are not metaphors!
Maybe a better way to put this is that object are not ONLY metaphors. But objects as metaphors is a good starting point for OO Analysis. Your domain is full of objects. Some of those objects will be suitable for classes. Many of them won't. That why you do the analysis. In terms of the airfoil example, an airfoil as an object in the domain *may* be suitable for an OO class. But maybe not. But it's the best place to start looking. Perhaps an airfoil would be better represented as a collection of surface objects.
Using objects as metaphors is "top down" analysis. Using the base data structures to build objects from is "bottom up" analysis. Neither is wrong.
The comment got modded up to funny, but it's dead on the mark. OO Programming is about O (Objects). When designing a program, first determine the objects in your domain. The stuff you specifically mentioned are not objects. If you can't find any objects in your domain, then don't go the OO route.
Here's an example: Airfoil design. The object in the domain is the airfoil (and probably composed of other objects like surfaces, sections, etc). The actual equations used are not the object, they are what you do with the object. So when you talk about finite difference solutions, fluid dynamics, and iterative solutions, you aren't talking about objects, but what you can do WITH objects.
Even if OO doesn't fit your domain, take a look at the STL and Generic Programming in general. There's some useful stuff in there for your needs.
The GNU versions of the basic Unix tools are larger than the BSD versions, primarily because they add a whole bunch of functionality. That's good if you have the space. But it's not good if you're in an embedded or tiny environment.
One BSD tool worth having (off the top of my head as an example): sh. Plain old sh. On my current system sh is 34K and bash is 388K. Big difference. Guess which shell I want on my rescue disk? In addition, even if bash is your primary shell (as it is mine), it still pays to make sure your shell scripts are bourne compatible. Then if you have sh on your system, instead of merely a symlink to bash, you'll use fewer resources running them. For a busy server or a slow machine it can make a noticable difference.
BSD has contributed so little outside of its little world.
It's time for YOU to wake up and smell the coffee. Sendmail, BIND, vi, TCP/IP, lpd, Berkeley DB, etc.
Many BSD tools are better than the equivalent GNU tools. And many GNU tools are better than the equivalent from BSD. It all depends on what you want.
I don't know about OpenBSD, but many of the standard default tools for FreeBSD *are* from GNU. The converse situation (BSD tools in a Linux distro) is virtually nil. I suspect that the GNU advocates are the ones that can't abide foreign tools.
I mean, it's a motivational email to (presumably) a bunch of sales wonks, encouraging them to try and sell their products. Gasp, call the Justice Department.
Yes, call the DoJ! As has been repeatedly told to me in the past (in vitriolic ways), Microsoft is a monopoly and must follow *different* rules than mon-monopolies do. Just because it is legal, ethical and moral for your or I to motivate out sales force, does not mean that it is legal, ethical or moral for Microsoft to do so.
They must be accountable to different standards! The DoJ must forbid them from motivating their employees.
If you're a developer, then of course you can go back and fix it. But if you're not, forget about it.
Er... isn't C++ written in C?
In the GNU world, yes. But so what? So is fortran, ada, objective C, java, and every other language that gcc supports.
If C++ compilers were standard on all Unix platforms, then it would make sense to write a compiler in C++. But a lot of platforms don't. I don't see how you could bootstrap a C++ compiler written in C++ using only the default C compiler. Compilers aren't written in C because C is better than C++, but rather because C is the lowest common denominator language on Unix.
Why can't you have a nice toolkit written in C that uses a nice clean OO-like interface?
GTK+ is a nice toolkit. But it stretches things quite a bit to call its OO interface "clean".
Using object oriented programming techniques in C is not a sign of delusion, it's an attempt to do more with less.
You can always do more with less. So why not write your OO program in assember? Just because I can build a house armed with only a screwdriver does not mean that's the way it should be done. I have only myself to blame if my neighbors think me delusional for hammering, sawing and spackling with only a screwdriver, especially when my toolbox includes hammers, saws and putty knives.
There are some OO like things you can do in C easily. But most of them are very difficult. It's not worth the effort when you can do the very same thing, and more, with a real OO language. C++ may not be the perfect OO language, but I would rather hammer in nails with an imperfect hammer than with an elegant screwdriver.
This is the nice property of open source - software doesn't die unless everyone loses interest in it
The corollary being that as long as people have interest in it, it will remain? Funny, the same thing happens with closed source software as well.
Windows 95 isn't dead because people still have interest in it. Only it's name changed. Now it's Win98SE and WinME. What? You meant that Microsoft no longer supports Win95? Well duh! And neither does Redhat support their 4.2 version.
To deny the citizenry the right to own firearms and to pray in school is to repudiate one fifth of the Bill of Rights, impose increased governmental interfence, and increase governmental power. That the ACLU is against these rights only means that they cannot be civil libertarians.
The right of the fetus is a debatable issue, but for those that believe that the Bill of Rights applies to all human beings regardless of birth status, the conclusion is obvious. I find it ironic however that the ACLU would defend the right of the KKK to march in Skokie, but doesn't want a prolifer within fifty feet of an abortion clinic.
And as for the current proposals for national security, those aren't conservative at all! Bush stopped being a conservative the instant he announced a department of Homeland Security, and congressional Democrats didn't suddenly switch sides when they rammed through the federalisation of airport security.
Just because they don't defend all civil liberties, it doesn't mean that they aren't defending some very important ones.
They may be defending some important civil liberties, but they aren't even close to defending the top ten most important civil liberties. It seems to me that they stopped halfway through the first one.
It's a reasonable set of counter examples.
The only way it could be reasonable is if communists are liberals in the same way that white supremacists are conservatives.
There are no christian conservatives in the KKK. Stop listening to the liberal mainstream press.
Christian: one who holds that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior, and is a Jew. The New Testament was written by Jews who were practicing Jews while they wrote it. The KKK hates Jews. They hate Jews so much that they created their own church in which they heavily edited the Bible. Their religion is a cult.
Conservative: (in the political sense applied to the US, where the KKK reside) one who believes in limited government. The men of the past who defined what conservatism means were against the KKK. Of all the current crop of conservative talk show hosts, two of which were mentioned earlier in the thread, none are sympathetic in any way to the KKK or the idea of White Supremacy. The KKK's politics are much closer to that of the National Socialist party. At the best they are angry populists. They want a large, intrusive government for everyone not of their race.
You can't find a more hardcore group of christian conservatives than the John Birch Society. The JBS hates the KKK. You need to figure out just what the KKK is before you start throwing that label at people who don't follow your particular political persuasion.
Except for those times that the ACLU defended the KKK's right to protest
How insulting can you be! The poster complained of the liberal and anti-christian bent of the ACLU and you respond with the KKK. For your information, the KKK is NOT representative of conservatives or christians.
The ACLU is all for certain clauses in the First Amendment. For the remaining clauses, they are either ignored or twisted out of recognition. Regarding the Second Amendment, I doubt most members of the ACLU even know it exists.
It's time for those who truly understand what civil liberties are to abandon the organization that abandoned civil liberties.
it only seems to be behind if you use Debian stable
Perhaps the bleeding edge Debian gets released just as fast as all the other distros, but but stable Debian is what counts. If Debian unstable is supposed to be the mainline branch, then why is it called "unstable"?
Debian stable is what counts, and I expect quicker results from a constipated tortoise than from Debian stable.
I'm not sure it's a joke. It's the same old story that been around for twenty years. Go peruse the software shelves and see how many of this weeks titles won't run on last years state-of-the-art systems.
Everytime I run across a slow or sluggish program the solution is always to get a faster machine. Perhaps a 1.2Ghz Athlon is obsolete. If so, then my 1.33Ghz Athlon must be obsolete as well, or will be by the end of the week. Well screw it! I'm tired of chasing after other people's standards. If the software won't run on my system it's cheaper not to buy that software than to upgrade the CPU.
I'll leave it to the zealots to argue whether this is a win for KDE's superior integration or GNOME's modularity...
It's neither. It's simply that there's more GTK+ applications available than Qt applications. Remember that GTK+ was a thriving toolkit before GNOME ever got thought of, but no one ever used Qt much until KDE came about.
This issue isn't KDE vs GNOME, but Qt versus GTK+. Looking at the toolkits, one sees that Qt objects are constructed through inheritance while GTK+ objects are constructed through composition. There are advantages and disadvantages to both. Translated to a higher level, GNOME is composed of GTK+ while KDE is inherited from Qt.
It's not a matter of KDE vs GNOME, but of composition versus inheritance. Composition leads to greater modularity while inheritance leads to greater cohesiveness (integration).
I tried FreeBSD two years ago, and it subsequently became my primary OS. On the topic of lo-fat desktops, most distros can be made lo-fat. But in my mind, FreeBSD makes it easiest to keep that fat off while still keeping muscle tone.
The biggest advantage to FreeBSD for me is not it's lo-fat-ness, but the fact that I get to be in sole control of my system without having to work very hard at it. For instance, I use an Athlon so I want everything optimized for the Athlon. I can rebuilt everything under Redhat, Debian or Slackware for Athlon optimization, but it's a major pain in the butt. With FreeBSD it's two simple steps, one for the base system, and one for all the packages.
I'm afraid you didn't understand me.
People by organic tomatoes because they are tomatoes, not because they aren't radishes. A tomato is no substitute for a radish. When people choose Linux solely because it isn't Windows, they are asserting that one is a valid subtitute for the other.
I know many Jews who follow a kosher diet. Pork is forbidden to them. Yet I know some who find nothing wrong with fake ham made from turkey. I find this ridiculous. It may be a suitable substitute when drowned in mayonnaise and mustard, but why would a Jew want a ham substitute anyway? I don't want to get into any theological discussions, so don't bother answering that last question. Choosing Linux just because it isn't Windows is like using turkey-ham for instead of real ham. I don't want ham. I want a roast beef sandwich. I don't want a ham sandwich that doesn't have real ham in it. Yet all I hear from the Linux community is that their favorite kosher OS needs to be more like that forbidden pork butt.
Don't forget those systems where you're required to change your password every six months. Now you get passwords like:
password1
password2
password3
password4
(start back at the top and repeat)