If I want to write a little virus am I going to write it for a program that 90% of computer uses use, or the program that 1% of people use.
If I want to write a virus, am I going to write it for the platform whose design lends itself to virus writing, or for the platform that makes it difficult to write viruses.
This is why I'm glad my brother-in-law is the family Windows support person and I only help with the linux side of things. My mother uses a Mac so no support required from me, and my brother dual boots XP and Mandrake 9.2, and he knows only to ask my help with Mandrake and not XP. I can truthfully play ignorant about fixing Windows because I haven't kept up with Windows developments since 3.1. My brother-in-law thinks Windows is better than Linux, and for his needs it probably is.
The average users don't want to remember text commands and syntax
Text-based != Command-based.
There is such a thing as text based menus. POS systems in department stores are often text/menu based, although they are moving to GUI I've noticed. I see no benefit in having a GUI client for a POS system running on Windows(tm) when a 3270 session (or similar) would require cheaper hardware at the checkout and less futzing with the mouse (keyboard-entry / barcode-scanner-entry is quicker than point-n-click). It's not about looking pretty, but being able to process transactions quickly. I work in a call-centre where average handling time of calls is the most important metric (actually, customer satisfaction is more important IMNSHO, but that's harder to measure so they go for AHT instead). We use several different clients to various customer databases and billing systems, and the text-based (3270) clients are so much faster than the gui ones. The drive to swith to GUI for the sake of using GUI is one of my pet peeves.
Don't be deceived by the lies - the brainwashing and bullshit terms like "Intellectual Property" and "Piracy".
Hear hear! I am against the commoditisation of information. Information is a service, not a commodity. As such, it cannot be called "Intellectual Property". Companies whose business model is based on free software and value added services are on the rise. Companies whose business model is based on proprietary software will eventually decline (maybe not soon, but within the next two decades). I'd love to see music head this way. If musicians made their money by performing rather than recording, not only would the middlemen (RIAA, RIANZ etc) decline, but so would the mega-stars, giving way to local talent. That is something I'd love to see.
Piracy is robbery, thuggery and often murder committed at sea. A modern day pirate robs cargo ships by force of arms.
AFAIK, if an agent acting on your behalf breaks the seal, then in a legal sense you are breaking the seal. You can't get around clauses of the type "by committing action X you agree to Y" by commissioning an agent to commit action X on your behalf. This post is not legal advice - consult a lawyer in your jurisdiction for clarification.
I find local LUG mailing lists are most helpful. Plus you get to meet the other subscribers to the list from time to time - and you'll discover it's a small world when you start to see names of people you've been acquainted with in other circles start showing up on the local LUG mailing list. Then there's the annual installfests that many LUGs run, and a good LUG will also run a workshop every few months where you can bring along your PC to get a tricky sound card or other peripheral configured properly. This is peer-to-peer support at its best.
I suppose most people could probably even manage to use Bash to launch programs
This is exactly what I do, from an xterm on my icewm desktop. I discovered that if I want to launch another app, it's quicker to Alt-Tab to the xterm, type the first few letters of the app and tab-complete it, then shift-7 (to add the & so I get another bash prompt), then enter, rather than futz around hunting for the shortcut (which would require minimising everything to get to the desktop) or hunting through the K-menu/start-menu/whatever. Some people find the gui quicker. I find the mouse too fiddly.
That crap with SCO needs to end. Who is going to take McBride to the whores - it seems to me that he needs to get laid. You can stay nice, some people deserve it. In my family the loo is called "McBride" and the crap that gets flushed away is called "Sontag".
Thank you SCO for the much needed humour - you've done your best.
Sorry to any dutch folks if I mistranslated - I left NL when I was five and was raised in an english speaking country.
Try rural New Zealand. In a Canterbury Nor'wester it's not uncommon for a tree to fall on a power line. In gale force nor'westers I've even heard of those big steel pylons to bend & crumple. Parts of New Zealand are even more sparsely populated than the USA (4 million people in a country of similar size to the state of California). No-one in NZ would run a mission-critical server without an UPS. As for voltage fluctuations - better have a good filter too.
In the call centre where I work, we're migrating from a console based billing system/customer database (basicly just a 3270 session connected to a mainframe) to a gui based system that IMNSHO sucks dirt. The pointy clickiness of the gui based client only slows down those who are lightning fast with the 3270 based app, and average call handling times (the only thing that really matters to management) has gone up as a result.
So much for gui being better than text based apps.
However, laptops are a different story. Of all the people I know who've tried to run Linux on a laptop, none have managed to get more than 90-95% of the whole system working
Try 99.99% - the only thing not working is the modem, which I don't need since I have an RJ45 wall socket in every room where it's needed. Since I don't need or want to use the modem it counts for less than 0.01%
Yeah, but it looks like your OS/2 experience would come in handy when X locks up on you....
Yeah, but switching to a VT and typing "killall XFree86" (or "/etc/init.d/xdm restart") is a whole lot easier then rebooting...
How can you <Ctrl> + <Alt> + <F1> to a VT if the keyboard is frozen by X as well? Then again, you can ssh into the box and type "killall XFree86" (or "/etc/init.d/xdm restart")...
Can any one group stop any other group from commencing a Mars Terraforming Project? The scientists who want to preserve Mars as is for research, versus the expansionists who want Mars to be an off-site back-up for Earth's lifeforms.
Who has jurisdiction over Mars? The USA? The EU? The UN? What if some privately funded group said "Sod Earth, we're starting a new colony off-planet" and begun their own Martian Colonisation project? Would those actually living there (inside protected domes to start with) have more say than earth-based administrators/legislators? Could there be, in future, a war of independance between the martian settlers and the earth-based administrators/legislators? Could a privately funded Mars Colony be stopped by scientists wanting to preserve Mars for research? If an injunction was filed against such a group in a US court, would a European Mars Colony Project be bound by that? If an injunctions was filed in an international court, could the group claim that the earth court's jurisdiction does not include Mars? Has anyone else thought of these issues?
You can assign hotkeys to any OOo event including fill-down. It's just not done by default (which I admit is a shortcoming) but fortunately you only have to do this once.
The article is geared toward companies, not individuals. Sure, everyone can afford open office. But not many companies can afford to replace all their windows desktops!
Loads faster, fully customisable, and if your browser is also your file manager (eg konqueror) you can use it to launch all sorts of local stuff seamlessly from the same page that you use for external links.
Actually, my local index.html shows the firewall webpage in one frame, and all the other stuff in another frame.
If your set-up requires you to initiate an internet connection (eg dial-up) and you use a firewall (eg ipcop, smoothwall) then it makes sense for your "home" page to point to your firewall's "connect/disconnect" page.
You could buy a bigger case with more drive bays, and an IDE HDD caddy system. These consist of caddies that hold a normal 'internal' 3.5" HDD which fit into a special slot installed in a 5.25" drive bay. You can buy a spare caddy each time you buy a new IDE hard drive.
If your data is very valuable to you, I would suggest buying two spare drives and caddies, making two backups and storing one at a friends'/parents'/relatives' house.
How can you boot with a floppy/Knoppix CD without first getting into the BIOS to change the boot order?
As for removing the HDD - that would be a bit conspicuous. I would add to the suggestion of BIOS and Grub/Lilo and Windows/Linux password, also bolt down the physcical case and see if you can put some kind of locking device on the case to prevent someone from removing the cover (to steal the HDD).
Ah, you "would estimate"! and I explained the reasoning behind my estimate. Which part of my reasoning was wrong? Anyway, it's probably a conservative estimate. Home PC ownership is orders of magnitude greater today than in the mid 1980s, when PCs competed with Apple 2s, Ataris, C64s etc.
Forget the suid bit then. If it's only searching $HOME for target email addresses it doesn't need root. Neither does it need root to call the 'mail' command. I was merely speculating about the feasibility of a linux virus. You could even add a payload to 'rm -rf $HOME/*' if you were really nasty. Again, no root required. How is losing $HOME less devestating than losing/usr/bin?
The reason most (or all) viruses are written for Windows is because that's where they'll do the most damage, since most people use Windows
This is a tired old argument - that windows has more viruses because it has a larger installed base. Consider this. Back in the 1980s, MS-DOS/PC-DOS was the OS for the PC architecture (we called them IBM clones in those days). Among the warez community floppy boot sector viruses were very common. Nearly every other disk someone lent me had a virus (I used a virus scanner, many of my friends didn't). I would estimate that the number of Linux boxes installed today would be at least as big as the number of MS-DOS/PC-DOS installations back in the 1980s. This unscientific estimate is based on the fact that back then mostly geeks had PCs at home, and most geeks today run Linux - not to mention the number of web servers and the like. Given that in the current climate where nearly everyone who owns a Linux box has an ISP account, viruses spread faster than when they relied on floppy boot sectors and assuming that there are as many linux boxes today as there were DOS boxes in the mid 80s, you would expect at least as many Linux viruses today as there were DOS viruses in the mid 80s. There aren't.
Now I could email you a.tar.gz file (which preserves permissions) containing a setuid-root shell script that searches $HOME for files containing email addresses, and then mails the tarball to every address it finds. I could call the tarball Annakournikovanaked.tar.gz and the shell script HotandDirty.sh, and I'm sure many linux n00bs would open it in kmail. kmail would ask if you want to open the tarball attachment in karchiver, and then you would open HotandDirty.sh from within karchiver and it would do its thing - so linux viruses are possible I guess. They still rely on user stupidity/lust though.
Perhaps the kind of person who develops free software also prefers a free platform. This is not a flame or a troll - just a thought that occurs to me. If you don't want to install another OS, download knoppix. I'd expect there to be a record tool on knoppix.
belonging to the modern era; relating to a recently developed fashion or style; Refers to recent times or the present.
Thefore KDE is a modern GUI. Whether it is a good GUI, or an innovative or intuitive GUI is perhaps subjective (it works for my wife. I use icewm myself - actually I lauch apps from an xterm rather than clicking on desktop icons). But by the definitions I can find it's modern.
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If I want to write a little virus am I going to write it for a program that 90% of computer uses use, or the program that 1% of people use.
If I want to write a virus, am I going to write it for the platform whose design lends itself to virus writing, or for the platform that makes it difficult to write viruses.
This is why I'm glad my brother-in-law is the family Windows support person and I only help with the linux side of things. My mother uses a Mac so no support required from me, and my brother dual boots XP and Mandrake 9.2, and he knows only to ask my help with Mandrake and not XP. I can truthfully play ignorant about fixing Windows because I haven't kept up with Windows developments since 3.1. My brother-in-law thinks Windows is better than Linux, and for his needs it probably is.
The average users don't want to remember text commands and syntax
Text-based != Command-based.
There is such a thing as text based menus. POS systems in department stores are often text/menu based, although they are moving to GUI I've noticed. I see no benefit in having a GUI client for a POS system running on Windows(tm) when a 3270 session (or similar) would require cheaper hardware at the checkout and less futzing with the mouse (keyboard-entry / barcode-scanner-entry is quicker than point-n-click). It's not about looking pretty, but being able to process transactions quickly.
I work in a call-centre where average handling time of calls is the most important metric (actually, customer satisfaction is more important IMNSHO, but that's harder to measure so they go for AHT instead). We use several different clients to various customer databases and billing systems, and the text-based (3270) clients are so much faster than the gui ones. The drive to swith to GUI for the sake of using GUI is one of my pet peeves.
Don't be deceived by the lies - the brainwashing and bullshit terms like "Intellectual Property" and "Piracy".
Hear hear!
I am against the commoditisation of information. Information is a service, not a commodity. As such, it cannot be called "Intellectual Property ".
Companies whose business model is based on free software and value added services are on the rise. Companies whose business model is based on proprietary software will eventually decline (maybe not soon, but within the next two decades). I'd love to see music head this way. If musicians made their money by performing rather than recording, not only would the middlemen (RIAA, RIANZ etc) decline, but so would the mega-stars, giving way to local talent. That is something I'd love to see.
Piracy is robbery, thuggery and often murder committed at sea.
A modern day pirate robs cargo ships by force of arms.
AFAIK, if an agent acting on your behalf breaks the seal, then in a legal sense you are breaking the seal. You can't get around clauses of the type "by committing action X you agree to Y" by commissioning an agent to commit action X on your behalf. This post is not legal advice - consult a lawyer in your jurisdiction for clarification.
I find local LUG mailing lists are most helpful. Plus you get to meet the other subscribers to the list from time to time - and you'll discover it's a small world when you start to see names of people you've been acquainted with in other circles start showing up on the local LUG mailing list.
Then there's the annual installfests that many LUGs run, and a good LUG will also run a workshop every few months where you can bring along your PC to get a tricky sound card or other peripheral configured properly.
This is peer-to-peer support at its best.
I suppose most people could probably even manage to use Bash to launch programs
This is exactly what I do, from an xterm on my icewm desktop.
I discovered that if I want to launch another app, it's quicker to Alt-Tab to the xterm, type the first few letters of the app and tab-complete it, then shift-7 (to add the & so I get another bash prompt), then enter, rather than futz around hunting for the shortcut (which would require minimising everything to get to the desktop) or hunting through the K-menu/start-menu/whatever.
Some people find the gui quicker. I find the mouse too fiddly.
Very loosely translated:
That crap with SCO needs to end.
Who is going to take McBride to the whores - it seems to me that he needs to get laid.
You can stay nice, some people deserve it.
In my family the loo is called "McBride" and the crap that gets flushed away is called "Sontag".
Thank you SCO for the much needed humour - you've done your best.
Sorry to any dutch folks if I mistranslated - I left NL when I was five and was raised in an english speaking country.
Try rural New Zealand. In a Canterbury Nor'wester it's not uncommon for a tree to fall on a power line. In gale force nor'westers I've even heard of those big steel pylons to bend & crumple. Parts of New Zealand are even more sparsely populated than the USA (4 million people in a country of similar size to the state of California).
No-one in NZ would run a mission-critical server without an UPS.
As for voltage fluctuations - better have a good filter too.
In the call centre where I work, we're migrating from a console based billing system/customer database (basicly just a 3270 session connected to a mainframe) to a gui based system that IMNSHO sucks dirt.
The pointy clickiness of the gui based client only slows down those who are lightning fast with the 3270 based app, and average call handling times (the only thing that really matters to management) has gone up as a result.
So much for gui being better than text based apps.
However, laptops are a different story. Of all the people I know who've tried to run Linux on a laptop, none have managed to get more than 90-95% of the whole system working
Try 99.99% - the only thing not working is the modem, which I don't need since I have an RJ45 wall socket in every room where it's needed.
Since I don't need or want to use the modem it counts for less than 0.01%
Yeah, but it looks like your OS/2 experience would come in handy when X locks up on you....
...
Yeah, but switching to a VT and typing "killall XFree86" (or "/etc/init.d/xdm restart") is a whole lot easier then rebooting...
How can you <Ctrl> + <Alt> + <F1> to a VT if the keyboard is frozen by X as well?
Then again, you can ssh into the box and type "killall XFree86" (or "/etc/init.d/xdm restart")
Can any one group stop any other group from commencing a Mars Terraforming Project? The scientists who want to preserve Mars as is for research, versus the expansionists who want Mars to be an off-site back-up for Earth's lifeforms.
Who has jurisdiction over Mars? The USA? The EU? The UN? What if some privately funded group said "Sod Earth, we're starting a new colony off-planet" and begun their own Martian Colonisation project? Would those actually living there (inside protected domes to start with) have more say than earth-based administrators/legislators? Could there be, in future, a war of independance between the martian settlers and the earth-based administrators/legislators?
Could a privately funded Mars Colony be stopped by scientists wanting to preserve Mars for research? If an injunction was filed against such a group in a US court, would a European Mars Colony Project be bound by that? If an injunctions was filed in an international court, could the group claim that the earth court's jurisdiction does not include Mars? Has anyone else thought of these issues?
You can assign hotkeys to any OOo event including fill-down. It's just not done by default (which I admit is a shortcoming) but fortunately you only have to do this once.
I've found OOo 1.1 loads a bit faster than 1.0. It seems more stable too. Anyone using OOo 1.0 should really upgrade to 1.1 - it's worth it.
The article is geared toward companies, not individuals. Sure, everyone can afford open office. But not many companies can afford to replace all their windows desktops!
And how is this relevant to using open office?
Loads faster, fully customisable, and if your browser is also your file manager (eg konqueror) you can use it to launch all sorts of local stuff seamlessly from the same page that you use for external links.
Actually, my local index.html shows the firewall webpage in one frame, and all the other stuff in another frame.
If your set-up requires you to initiate an internet connection (eg dial-up) and you use a firewall (eg ipcop, smoothwall) then it makes sense for your "home" page to point to your firewall's "connect/disconnect" page.
You could buy a bigger case with more drive bays, and an IDE HDD caddy system. These consist of caddies that hold a normal 'internal' 3.5" HDD which fit into a special slot installed in a 5.25" drive bay. You can buy a spare caddy each time you buy a new IDE hard drive. If your data is very valuable to you, I would suggest buying two spare drives and caddies, making two backups and storing one at a friends'/parents'/relatives' house.
How can you boot with a floppy/Knoppix CD without first getting into the BIOS to change the boot order?
As for removing the HDD - that would be a bit conspicuous. I would add to the suggestion of BIOS and Grub/Lilo and Windows/Linux password, also bolt down the physcical case and see if you can put some kind of locking device on the case to prevent someone from removing the cover (to steal the HDD).
Ah, you "would estimate"!
and I explained the reasoning behind my estimate. Which part of my reasoning was wrong? Anyway, it's probably a conservative estimate. Home PC ownership is orders of magnitude greater today than in the mid 1980s, when PCs competed with Apple 2s, Ataris, C64s etc.
Forget the suid bit then. If it's only searching $HOME for target email addresses it doesn't need root. Neither does it need root to call the 'mail' command. I was merely speculating about the feasibility of a linux virus. You could even add a payload to 'rm -rf $HOME/*' if you were really nasty. Again, no root required. How is losing $HOME less devestating than losing /usr/bin?
The reason most (or all) viruses are written for Windows is because that's where they'll do the most damage, since most people use Windows
.tar.gz file (which preserves permissions) containing a setuid-root shell script that searches $HOME for files containing email addresses, and then mails the tarball to every address it finds.
This is a tired old argument - that windows has more viruses because it has a larger installed base.
Consider this. Back in the 1980s, MS-DOS/PC-DOS was the OS for the PC architecture (we called them IBM clones in those days).
Among the warez community floppy boot sector viruses were very common. Nearly every other disk someone lent me had a virus (I used a virus scanner, many of my friends didn't).
I would estimate that the number of Linux boxes installed today would be at least as big as the number of MS-DOS/PC-DOS installations back in the 1980s. This unscientific estimate is based on the fact that back then mostly geeks had PCs at home, and most geeks today run Linux - not to mention the number of web servers and the like.
Given that in the current climate where nearly everyone who owns a Linux box has an ISP account, viruses spread faster than when they relied on floppy boot sectors and assuming that there are as many linux boxes today as there were DOS boxes in the mid 80s, you would expect at least as many Linux viruses today as there were DOS viruses in the mid 80s. There aren't.
Now I could email you a
I could call the tarball Annakournikovanaked.tar.gz and the shell script HotandDirty.sh, and I'm sure many linux n00bs would open it in kmail. kmail would ask if you want to open the tarball attachment in karchiver, and then you would open HotandDirty.sh from within karchiver and it would do its thing - so linux viruses are possible I guess. They still rely on user stupidity/lust though.
Perhaps the kind of person who develops free software also prefers a free platform. This is not a flame or a troll - just a thought that occurs to me.
If you don't want to install another OS, download knoppix. I'd expect there to be a record tool on knoppix.
Some definitions of modern:
belonging to the modern era; relating to a recently developed fashion or style; Refers to recent times or the present.
Thefore KDE is a modern GUI. Whether it is a good GUI, or an innovative or intuitive GUI is perhaps subjective (it works for my wife. I use icewm myself - actually I lauch apps from an xterm rather than clicking on desktop icons). But by the definitions I can find it's modern.
Arg! Too many acronyms! I forgot that the TLA ASP had been overloaded. Sorry.