Huh. Yet interestingly, in the recent Larry Ellision interview in Playboy, Ellision mentions his $1000 suit as one of the reasons he wasn't personally rooting thru MS garbage, but had hired someone else to do it. I do think that this is just not something you can make a blanket statement about. Some folks like to brag that they "put one over" on a retailer by "saving" a bunch of $$$, others are not happy unless they spent a lot more money than they really needed to.
You listed two tasks and two different languages-- so reason #1 to use Perl over those others is so that you don't have to learn a new programming language each time you get a new problem domain. Just a thought... and personally I'd use Ruby over Perl for both of the above because it has all the compactness and power with absolutely none of the line noise.
Re:Yes! Functional names, not brand names.
on
KDE Gets The Hat
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· Score: 1
Or they could add the tag (or at least a pop-up) in the main menu like "Mozilla (Web Browser)" and "Galeon (Web Browser)" and "Konqueror (Web Browser)" and "Links (Text mode web browser)" and give us all the choices, but clearly labeled. Personally, I like when applications have their own names, but agree that for new users it gets harder and harder to figure out which program does what.
What more control could you want over scoping in Ruby?
As to the users of each language, I think there is a lot of cross-over... but whereas Perl seems to attract a lot of new or returning programmers to its ranks, Ruby seems to be a language chosen by people who've studied at least one other language for some time. And I don't know about the Perl community (although I've certainly put in some time at perlmonks.org), but the Ruby community is generally very open to learning other languages-- witness the HUGE thread on ruby-talk the last week about what language to learn next (inspired by the Pragmatic Programmer's "Language of the Year" project).
Actually, the only thing missing from the GUI browsers that would make them more keyboard friendly is a sense of getting TAB to go to the first link on that page-- not the next link in the document. Example: I can read a Slashdot thread just fine using page up/down, I can back up a page using Alt-left-arrow, but if I press tab to get to a link, I have to cycle through EVERY link on a page. Bad news. If tab started with the first visible link on the page, this would not be a problem. I can do an awful lot of browsing already without ever touching my mouse.
Links, a text mode browser, operates in this fashion.
Why not just make the browser more key interactive and put your hand back on the keyboard where it belongs?:)
QUESTION!
Where can I get Debian.debs for KDE3 (beta would be nice, but not essential) and Gnome 2? I vowed I was done messing around with compiling these two beasts from source... it's a severe PITA.
FWIW, OS X seems to have caught on to this complaint, now the trash can turns into the little eject symbol when you click on a CD (or maybe only when you start to drag a CD-- I wasn't paying that much attention to when it changed, only noticed that it had).
It doesn't really mean less either. The amount that people have to spend is a constant. What they spend it on is not. If they can download SELinux for free, or OpenBSD for free, then they can spend that money on something else-- and probably will. The overall economy is probably unaffected as a result, in fact we could argue that the economy is improved since people get more utility overall with less expense. From what I understand that is the whole goal of an economy: to distribute maximum utility as efficiently as possible.
But I think Microsoft sees it as lost revenue when anyone uses software that does something that MS writes software to do. And to some extent that's correct... that the government should avoid GPL software, however, does not follow logically from this assumption. That they cannot effectively compete with a product that is as free as the air we breathe is a problem with their business model. And, frankly, it's fair play via turnabout-- that's what they did to Netscape, after all.
So what? If you don't like the fonts, don't use them. I used to make fonts with Fontographer-- and they stank, at least from a typography perspective. But where I had the creativity to make an interesting set of letters, someone else might have the technical skills to shore up the font into a serious typeface. Hopefully those with the technical skills are applying them to typefaces that are in wide use in situations where typography matters. But for people making party invitations or for sale signs or whatever, typography doesn't matter-- in fact, we're lucky they don't just write the text by hand. And for those people amateur fonts are just fine.
People have been using poorly written commercial software for decades now... do you see any major trend towards labelling all commercial software based on the flaws of one (or more) package(s)?
Besides, it seems unlikely to this free software zealot that most users know much about "open source" or even care... just like most Slashbots don't care about the MPAA when their favorite sci-fi film comes out on DVD.
I believe the idea is to get government to use software that is open, not to force everyone to use it. Do you think the military should buy vehicles from GM if they can't see schematics for the trucks? Do you think intelligence agencies should use software without *full* access to the source code?
I heard a story once about how cameras were installed in Xerox machines sold to the Russian embassy, and the result was some great spy work-- technology is complicated and easily made to work against you.
While Microsoft is certainly a US company, what's to say that one of their programmers is, shall we say, less loyal to the cause, and might insert a backdoor in some server software? What's to say there isn't a glaring security flaw that some Russian hacker's found because the government there pays him to spend all day every day looking for such flaws, but which would have taken an American hacker five minutes to find during a review of the source code? That the source code is available isn't a guarantee of safety, but flaws are a lot easier to find than by guessing.
There is also the issue of taxpayer dollars spent. Not just on shrink-wrapped software, but on custom development. When a government agency develops an application in a proprietary fashion, that money is a sunk cost. When that development is prepared for release to the public, that expense is diluted, without detracting from the utility for that agency. Also, as a taxpayer, I feel I have some right to audit whether custom development funds are being spent wisely-- one way to verify that is to see if the code looks like crap.
Finally, government is a shared resource of the citizenry, as such it should be as efficient as possible. I just read the "Don't Repeat Yourself" chapter of "Pragmatic Programmer", and one of the examples in there was a routine for validating SSN that had been custom written by each departement and application group in an agency. That's wasting taxes. Had there been a spirit of "open source" development, surely this type of code would have been developed as a library that everyone could then rely on. The result would be more likely to be correct (wider review of code), and it would save each group that needs to verify SSNs that much development time. Most importantly, the results would have been uniform across the agency.
But should such software be GPL? I don't think that's necessary. Public domain or BSD licensing is sufficient, nothing prevents Free developers from GPL'ing their own derived works, thereby putting their own efforts into the "share and share alike" realm.
You're right. I'll spend more time with it before I criticize it again. Thankfully, my negative experience was actually spent getting my friend up to speed on his new iMac (which I recommended he get-- that's two Macs I've helped people buy in the last couple months)... so I'll have one available to try a little.
Thank you for one of the kinder responses to my flamebait!
I am aware that you can use other mice with OS X. I just think the default is a design fault. So much of the OS is geared towards mousing, why not make the mouse that much more powerful from the git-go?
I agree that Windows is ugly. My favorite GUI for Linux is Enlightenment, mostly because it gets out of the way most of the time.
You're right about (c). I guess I'm quickly getting de-accustomed to Mac OS (which I used heavily from 1987 to 1998).
I swear I looked at PPP, but I guess not. I *know* I checked the modem setup and TCP/IP for such an option, but couldn't find it.
Well, since my opinion was based on helping my friend get on his feet with his new iMac (which he bought on my recommendation), I'll have more opportunity to try it out--- now that I've convinced him not to just return the thing. You won't believe this: he was having trouble getting set up on the 'net, so he calls "tech support" at MacMall... they have him reinstall the entire OS from CD. He was still visibly depressed when I finally got there hours later.
I dunno what the AC's problem is, I'd be glad to spring for a new printer if can get decent dpi and color under Linux. My existing printer (practically an antique now: an Epson Stylus 740) has been sporadic under Linux, whereas under the old Mac OS it is brilliant. With Debian 3 out, I'll be giving the printer a go on an x86 box and see what happens. Either way, I assume *someone* out there is running a printer off Linux, and my legacy OS days are numbered.:)
Tried BSD. Was too used to default settings (BASH, basic fs structure, etc) from Linux, decided relearning or reconfiguring that was too much trouble for essentially the same software as a result. I don't see why, if I like BSD, I would buy an Apple to run it on though.
OK. I'll keep my mouth shut about all the Free Software that's available that the average user will find just as useful as stuff that costs hundreds of dollars. So far my biggest reason for not switching to all Linux hasn't been applications, it's been driver support for my printer.
IDE? Dev tools? I use emacs. That's it. And the VBA IDE for building MS Access apps at work. Which I hate, and would rather use emacs.
To me, YDL is something that is mostly useful to take existing Macs that would crawl with OS X and get them running a real OS. Mac OS 8.6 is the last Mac OS I've used much, though. Maybe 9 was an improvement in terms of stability. But you're right, the OS X community is much bigger than Linux/PPC, but I doubt the educated OS X community is bigger than the Linux community.
My comments were directed almost squarely at the visible user interface which I found annoying. a) the no-button mouse, after using scroll mice and relying heavily on right-clicking and center-clicking for a while now, the lack of buttons is disconcerting. b) it's ugly, that's an opinion, though, and not a fact. c) when you close the last window to an application, the application should quit, or at least ask if you want to quit, OS X leaves it running. d) no apparent ability for the TCP/IP stuff to autodetect traffic and, if needed, initiate a dialup connection.... this is all based on very limited exposure to the system. At the price it doesn't seem worth it to me. A long time ago I decided I would move towards a Free Software-only system and OS X offers few compelling reasons not to keep going that direction. YMMV, people are different and have different needs and wants.
I think this code could be refactored so that you aren't repeating yourself and possibly introducing errors. For instance, the RIAA.setEmotion(), MPAA.setEmotion(), etc, calls look like they are essentially booleans, so why not start with constant declaration where HATE = 1 and LOVE = 0, then instead of calling each one separately in two separate lists, you can simply have:
if(( day_of_week... { RIAA.setEmotion( RIAA.emotion ^ LOVE ); MPAA.setEmotion( MPAA.emotion ^ HATE ); ... }
That way you don't run the risk of accidentally missing an entity in the else cluase or accidentally setting an entity's emotion to the same thing in both the if clause and the else clause.
Even this isn't perfect and it would be better to simply write a method like RIAA.flipEmotion, since if you ever need to switch from binary to multiple levels of hate, love, and indifference, you can modify flipEmotion to simply work around an axis (like if your scale is 0 for love and 10 for hate, then mild distaste might be a 6 which would *.flipEmotion to 3, for mild attraction).
Yes, thanks to Mr. Gates you've been charged way too much for your software for the last 25 years so that he can donate to charity for you and then he's the hero, while you're just a whiner. BTW, get it straight. He did not donate $24 billion to anything. $24 billion is the total endowment of the Foundation. That's money the Foundation keeps in investments, using the interest to pay directors, staff, pay for programs and make grants/donations. Furthermore, Bill's net worth is only around $30 billion, so I doubt he just gave away 80% of his net worth.
According to this Guardian article Gates is also on record investing large portions of that money into multinational pharmaceutical corporations... and Gates supports there so-called "intellectual property" rights to the medicines they develop (and which "rights" are the drivers behind their double-digit profits, and the primary reason vaccinations aren't already more widely available in places like Africa).
So i tell you what, I'll set up a similar endowment for charity (split 50/50 between Free Software and medical/social causes) using my own money-- and I'll do it in proportion to what Gates has contributed (personally, money funneled from MS into the Foundation doesn't count). I expect I'll have to keep the endowment in a private account though (since I hardly want to spend the entire endowment principal on lawyers fees setting up the endowment), which erases the enormous tax/legal benefits that someone like Gates gets from these activities.
So for those of you still paying attention. If I set up a private endowment of $1000 (assumes 5% return on either EE Bonds or bank CDS, since equity or bond investment accounts would have fees and transaction costs that would wipe out gains), I can probably donate $50 a year to charity. But I've done much, much better than that already this year without an endowment.
Please get back to me with Bill Gates average annual income (net, after tax) for the last five years, his donations history over that same period, and I'll detail the results of my own charitable program on my web site, proving that us little guys giving small amounts are actually doing more than rich leeches like Bill Gates.
Man, are you kidding? That GUI is completely lame, and other than that I don't see a single selling point for Mac OS X as a Unix. I'll stick with Debian, thanks.
And yeah, if you already have a Mac and you want Linux, YellowDog is the way to go-- YDL was my first Linux and I still use it daily... but I'm glad they didn't come out with this announcement sooner, I might have bought one... thankfully Apple's prices are such that I had to bide my time-- and I don't see where this is a value from TerraSoft, since it's not like I'm getting a piece of Apple hardware and then saving money by not having Mac OS installed. It's just the Microsoft tax all over again, only with a much cooler company involved.
You can bypass almost any digital copy protection using analog. Its not as degrading as you may think.
You may not think it's degrading, but personally I find it offensive-- even if the signal quality does not degrade significantly from digital to analog.;)
Re:Someone discovered Windows is insecure.
on
Shattering Windows
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· Score: 1
I didn't intend to imply that anyone should use a Microsoft product when perfectly good alternatives are available. However, their advice in this case is sound... the problem is not with the HTML standard though, which you seemed to be saying. Unless your web site needs the ability to accept files, this option *should* be turned off at the server. And if you are writing Perl/CGI you probably want to consider using CGI::Safe, which will turn this off as a default, and provides some assistance in preventing certain overruns as well.
And to further defend MS (and I'm not happy to be doing so at all), on Windows 2000 (which I use at work, and not really by choice at this point) each file appears to have permissions settings for "Full Control", "Modify", "Read", "Read & Execute", and "Write". Additionally, folders/directories have a "List Folder Contents" item. All of these appear to be controllable (accept or deny) at the user level. I have never worked with this, though, so I don't know how it looks in practice. But on the surface it seems very similar to Unix-style permissions-- in fact, it might be something of an improvement.
I'm not sure how any of your example situations are problems for me or my machines, except that there do seem to be a number of compromised MS hosts out in the wild. That the people who choose Microsoft technology then find themselves unable to securely manage such technology (which is basically the generic situation you've posited) is, to me, almost poetic justice.
I am sorry to hear that your independent security auditing got you into so much trouble at school. Schools are notoriously difficult places when they think their policies have been violated-- and often their policies are senseless, arbitrary, and designed for either the lowest common denominator or to please some vocal special interest.
Re:Someone discovered Windows is insecure.
on
Shattering Windows
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· Score: 1
In #4, you're missing an end italic tag somewhere I think... but either way your point is not well made, and for once MS says something intelligent. They just don't say it very well.
The INPUT/file tag is fine. It *should* be implemented. How the heck am I going to submit files via web form without it? Only the truly fool-hardy would execute those uploads on the server though. And in that same vein, those files should *never* be stored with executable permissions.
OK. Point taken. Debian is a tad more difficult to install than your average RedHat release. So let's change that uninstall command: "rpm -e software". Wow, that's even easier, except that it's slightly more cryptic. No problem though. Red Hat has a graphical RPM manager that makes this all point & click.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh. Yet interestingly, in the recent Larry Ellision interview in Playboy, Ellision mentions his $1000 suit as one of the reasons he wasn't personally rooting thru MS garbage, but had hired someone else to do it. I do think that this is just not something you can make a blanket statement about. Some folks like to brag that they "put one over" on a retailer by "saving" a bunch of $$$, others are not happy unless they spent a lot more money than they really needed to.
You listed two tasks and two different languages-- so reason #1 to use Perl over those others is so that you don't have to learn a new programming language each time you get a new problem domain. Just a thought... and personally I'd use Ruby over Perl for both of the above because it has all the compactness and power with absolutely none of the line noise.
Or they could add the tag (or at least a pop-up) in the main menu like "Mozilla (Web Browser)" and "Galeon (Web Browser)" and "Konqueror (Web Browser)" and "Links (Text mode web browser)" and give us all the choices, but clearly labeled. Personally, I like when applications have their own names, but agree that for new users it gets harder and harder to figure out which program does what.
As to the users of each language, I think there is a lot of cross-over... but whereas Perl seems to attract a lot of new or returning programmers to its ranks, Ruby seems to be a language chosen by people who've studied at least one other language for some time. And I don't know about the Perl community (although I've certainly put in some time at perlmonks.org), but the Ruby community is generally very open to learning other languages-- witness the HUGE thread on ruby-talk the last week about what language to learn next (inspired by the Pragmatic Programmer's "Language of the Year" project).
Links, a text mode browser, operates in this fashion.
QUESTION!
Where can I get Debian .debs for KDE3 (beta would be nice, but not essential) and Gnome 2? I vowed I was done messing around with compiling these two beasts from source... it's a severe PITA.
Hmmm. I think your expectations are a wee bit high then. Even Mac OS X is going to occasionally require the user to check the manual once in a while.
FWIW, OS X seems to have caught on to this complaint, now the trash can turns into the little eject symbol when you click on a CD (or maybe only when you start to drag a CD-- I wasn't paying that much attention to when it changed, only noticed that it had).
But I think Microsoft sees it as lost revenue when anyone uses software that does something that MS writes software to do. And to some extent that's correct... that the government should avoid GPL software, however, does not follow logically from this assumption. That they cannot effectively compete with a product that is as free as the air we breathe is a problem with their business model. And, frankly, it's fair play via turnabout-- that's what they did to Netscape, after all.
Maybe want to try this:
Paul Graham has a spam plan
Statistics don't lie?
Huh. First time I've ever seen a discussion about "typography" which specifically excluded the printed word.
So what? If you don't like the fonts, don't use them. I used to make fonts with Fontographer-- and they stank, at least from a typography perspective. But where I had the creativity to make an interesting set of letters, someone else might have the technical skills to shore up the font into a serious typeface. Hopefully those with the technical skills are applying them to typefaces that are in wide use in situations where typography matters. But for people making party invitations or for sale signs or whatever, typography doesn't matter-- in fact, we're lucky they don't just write the text by hand. And for those people amateur fonts are just fine.
Besides, it seems unlikely to this free software zealot that most users know much about "open source" or even care... just like most Slashbots don't care about the MPAA when their favorite sci-fi film comes out on DVD.
I believe the idea is to get government to use software that is open, not to force everyone to use it. Do you think the military should buy vehicles from GM if they can't see schematics for the trucks? Do you think intelligence agencies should use software without *full* access to the source code?
I heard a story once about how cameras were installed in Xerox machines sold to the Russian embassy, and the result was some great spy work-- technology is complicated and easily made to work against you.
While Microsoft is certainly a US company, what's to say that one of their programmers is, shall we say, less loyal to the cause, and might insert a backdoor in some server software? What's to say there isn't a glaring security flaw that some Russian hacker's found because the government there pays him to spend all day every day looking for such flaws, but which would have taken an American hacker five minutes to find during a review of the source code? That the source code is available isn't a guarantee of safety, but flaws are a lot easier to find than by guessing.
There is also the issue of taxpayer dollars spent. Not just on shrink-wrapped software, but on custom development. When a government agency develops an application in a proprietary fashion, that money is a sunk cost. When that development is prepared for release to the public, that expense is diluted, without detracting from the utility for that agency. Also, as a taxpayer, I feel I have some right to audit whether custom development funds are being spent wisely-- one way to verify that is to see if the code looks like crap.
Finally, government is a shared resource of the citizenry, as such it should be as efficient as possible. I just read the "Don't Repeat Yourself" chapter of "Pragmatic Programmer", and one of the examples in there was a routine for validating SSN that had been custom written by each departement and application group in an agency. That's wasting taxes. Had there been a spirit of "open source" development, surely this type of code would have been developed as a library that everyone could then rely on. The result would be more likely to be correct (wider review of code), and it would save each group that needs to verify SSNs that much development time. Most importantly, the results would have been uniform across the agency.
But should such software be GPL? I don't think that's necessary. Public domain or BSD licensing is sufficient, nothing prevents Free developers from GPL'ing their own derived works, thereby putting their own efforts into the "share and share alike" realm.
You're right. I'll spend more time with it before I criticize it again. Thankfully, my negative experience was actually spent getting my friend up to speed on his new iMac (which I recommended he get-- that's two Macs I've helped people buy in the last couple months)... so I'll have one available to try a little.
I am aware that you can use other mice with OS X. I just think the default is a design fault. So much of the OS is geared towards mousing, why not make the mouse that much more powerful from the git-go?
I agree that Windows is ugly. My favorite GUI for Linux is Enlightenment, mostly because it gets out of the way most of the time.
You're right about (c). I guess I'm quickly getting de-accustomed to Mac OS (which I used heavily from 1987 to 1998).
I swear I looked at PPP, but I guess not. I *know* I checked the modem setup and TCP/IP for such an option, but couldn't find it.
Well, since my opinion was based on helping my friend get on his feet with his new iMac (which he bought on my recommendation), I'll have more opportunity to try it out--- now that I've convinced him not to just return the thing. You won't believe this: he was having trouble getting set up on the 'net, so he calls "tech support" at MacMall... they have him reinstall the entire OS from CD. He was still visibly depressed when I finally got there hours later.
I dunno what the AC's problem is, I'd be glad to spring for a new printer if can get decent dpi and color under Linux. My existing printer (practically an antique now: an Epson Stylus 740) has been sporadic under Linux, whereas under the old Mac OS it is brilliant. With Debian 3 out, I'll be giving the printer a go on an x86 box and see what happens. Either way, I assume *someone* out there is running a printer off Linux, and my legacy OS days are numbered. :)
b) Yep, and I said it was an opinion.
c) You're right, there's a good reason for it. Except that I still found it confusing and hard to tell when an app is still running.
d) OK, but in 30 minutes of looking through the TCP/IP config and modem setup I couldn't find it. So much for "very easy".
- What a relief!
:)
- Tried BSD. Was too used to default settings (BASH, basic fs structure, etc) from Linux, decided relearning or reconfiguring that was too much trouble for essentially the same software as a result. I don't see why, if I like BSD, I would buy an Apple to run it on though.
- OK. I'll keep my mouth shut about all the Free Software that's available that the average user will find just as useful as stuff that costs hundreds of dollars. So far my biggest reason for not switching to all Linux hasn't been applications, it's been driver support for my printer.
- IDE? Dev tools? I use emacs. That's it. And the VBA IDE for building MS Access apps at work. Which I hate, and would rather use emacs.
- To me, YDL is something that is mostly useful to take existing Macs that would crawl with OS X and get them running a real OS. Mac OS 8.6 is the last Mac OS I've used much, though. Maybe 9 was an improvement in terms of stability. But you're right, the OS X community is much bigger than Linux/PPC, but I doubt the educated OS X community is bigger than the Linux community.
My comments were directed almost squarely at the visible user interface which I found annoying. a) the no-button mouse, after using scroll mice and relying heavily on right-clicking and center-clicking for a while now, the lack of buttons is disconcerting. b) it's ugly, that's an opinion, though, and not a fact. c) when you close the last window to an application, the application should quit, or at least ask if you want to quit, OS X leaves it running. d) no apparent ability for the TCP/IP stuff to autodetect traffic and, if needed, initiate a dialup connection.... this is all based on very limited exposure to the system. At the price it doesn't seem worth it to me. A long time ago I decided I would move towards a Free Software-only system and OS X offers few compelling reasons not to keep going that direction. YMMV, people are different and have different needs and wants.Even this isn't perfect and it would be better to simply write a method like RIAA.flipEmotion, since if you ever need to switch from binary to multiple levels of hate, love, and indifference, you can modify flipEmotion to simply work around an axis (like if your scale is 0 for love and 10 for hate, then mild distaste might be a 6 which would *.flipEmotion to 3, for mild attraction).
According to this Guardian article Gates is also on record investing large portions of that money into multinational pharmaceutical corporations... and Gates supports there so-called "intellectual property" rights to the medicines they develop (and which "rights" are the drivers behind their double-digit profits, and the primary reason vaccinations aren't already more widely available in places like Africa).
So i tell you what, I'll set up a similar endowment for charity (split 50/50 between Free Software and medical/social causes) using my own money-- and I'll do it in proportion to what Gates has contributed (personally, money funneled from MS into the Foundation doesn't count). I expect I'll have to keep the endowment in a private account though (since I hardly want to spend the entire endowment principal on lawyers fees setting up the endowment), which erases the enormous tax/legal benefits that someone like Gates gets from these activities.
So for those of you still paying attention. If I set up a private endowment of $1000 (assumes 5% return on either EE Bonds or bank CDS, since equity or bond investment accounts would have fees and transaction costs that would wipe out gains), I can probably donate $50 a year to charity. But I've done much, much better than that already this year without an endowment.
Please get back to me with Bill Gates average annual income (net, after tax) for the last five years, his donations history over that same period, and I'll detail the results of my own charitable program on my web site, proving that us little guys giving small amounts are actually doing more than rich leeches like Bill Gates.
And yeah, if you already have a Mac and you want Linux, YellowDog is the way to go-- YDL was my first Linux and I still use it daily... but I'm glad they didn't come out with this announcement sooner, I might have bought one... thankfully Apple's prices are such that I had to bide my time-- and I don't see where this is a value from TerraSoft, since it's not like I'm getting a piece of Apple hardware and then saving money by not having Mac OS installed. It's just the Microsoft tax all over again, only with a much cooler company involved.
You may not think it's degrading, but personally I find it offensive-- even if the signal quality does not degrade significantly from digital to analog. ;)
And to further defend MS (and I'm not happy to be doing so at all), on Windows 2000 (which I use at work, and not really by choice at this point) each file appears to have permissions settings for "Full Control", "Modify", "Read", "Read & Execute", and "Write". Additionally, folders/directories have a "List Folder Contents" item. All of these appear to be controllable (accept or deny) at the user level. I have never worked with this, though, so I don't know how it looks in practice. But on the surface it seems very similar to Unix-style permissions-- in fact, it might be something of an improvement.
I'm not sure how any of your example situations are problems for me or my machines, except that there do seem to be a number of compromised MS hosts out in the wild. That the people who choose Microsoft technology then find themselves unable to securely manage such technology (which is basically the generic situation you've posited) is, to me, almost poetic justice.
I am sorry to hear that your independent security auditing got you into so much trouble at school. Schools are notoriously difficult places when they think their policies have been violated-- and often their policies are senseless, arbitrary, and designed for either the lowest common denominator or to please some vocal special interest.
The INPUT/file tag is fine. It *should* be implemented. How the heck am I going to submit files via web form without it? Only the truly fool-hardy would execute those uploads on the server though. And in that same vein, those files should *never* be stored with executable permissions.
OK. Point taken. Debian is a tad more difficult to install than your average RedHat release. So let's change that uninstall command: "rpm -e software". Wow, that's even easier, except that it's slightly more cryptic. No problem though. Red Hat has a graphical RPM manager that makes this all point & click.