Dunno about general tags but try using some png files with an alpha channel without providing an alternative for IE users that specifies that stupid directx alphaimageloader crap.
The problem here is that users see these problems on a web page. If it simply doesn't look good, they think 'wow, this site is so crappy, what stupid web developers' rather than blame their browser. In the case that the site intentionally looks fubared on IE and there is a prominent, clear statement and explanation, a user thinks 'the web developer is elitist and won't support my browser, and I know full well a site can do this stuff on IE because other sites do!'. The user could care less about standards and anyone else's experience aside from their own. If they see a bad website, they go to a similar, but different website that does look fine. Political agendas don't matter to a user unless the agenda is being pushed to someone who already believes.
For example, when you see a company website that renders poorly in mozilla, and a comparable website renders well, do you fire up IE to cater to the 'bad' site, or do you take your business to the place that caters more to your experience rather than their implied agenda of 'IE is dominant, other stuff is BS'. You go to the mozilla site, and the IE user would do the same to any site with an 'IE is bad' agenda.
Arg, the analogy is not only flawed, but useless, murder was not requsite for the end task to happen. The act of getting the discman back is legal, the murder would not.
In applying the principals to the XBox case at hand, the act of running linux on the box is legal. However, the *possible* offense would be the modding, not how the modding is used. EULA in relation to the XBox is probably not enforcable, but the DMCA may still apply, since the modchip would most likely be viewed as a circumvention device. MS would never pursue someone for modchipping their XBox for the express purpose of running linux, as this would introduce the possibility of the DMCA being shot down (same as when Adobe stopped trying to get that guy). We have a very clear, real set of circumstances in which no copyright would be violated, but the person would be afowl of copyright law anyway.
Well, for one, does it make playing of import games or dvds possible? At that point you could argue the design of the chip had the necessary side-effect of circumvention to accomplish the projects goals of playing european DVDs.
I personally think the DMCA should be repealed (same as you), it completely spits in the face of fair use and rubs it into the ground. I want to make backups of what I play and store the originals. The companies have repeatedly proven they are not up to the task of replacing defective, lost, or stolen media, especially after the obsolecence of the product or after the company goes bust. I have a modchipped playstation and I play my own copies of my games which are immediately put back in the cases and stored away, because I like to collect the stuff as well as play it. Punish the people copying and distributing copies illegally, do not punish those who excercise their right to fair use. The DMCA would probably not stand up in the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, the cases relevant are civil cases and as such the prosecuting party can opt to drop suit at any time. Because of this combination, we regularly see the big companies back off of cases where the defense can afford to go to the Supreme Court and it looks likely that it could happen. The big companies know their preciousssss DMCA is on extremely shaky ground and don't want to rock the boat.
What I want to see is a party develop a crappy protection procedure and use it with the express intent of another, cooperating party circumventing it. Then the two escalate with minimal legal costs the issue as high as it can go in hopes of reaching the supreme court. Repeat until some measure of success is had.
Replace all occurences of MPH to MPG, to make it actually make sense. But the same could go for MPH, so long as you don't break laws after such a modifications.
Your argument is so strange and completely orthogonal to the issue at hand.
You are trying to get people to see how this would be valid in a car situation, and why we wouldn't argue with it. The hypothetical kids would have been arrested for speeding and driving without a license. They probably wouldn't go to jail, but to even suggest the possibility you admit that the offenses for which they are being punished would be criminal, not civil (as breaking EULA would be civil). In this scenario they were punished for speeding, reckless driving, whatever.
Let's modify this scenario to say the good car got 200 MPH (radically different Fuel Injection, let's say for sake of argument) but the base model got 5 MPH and they printed on a sticker saying 'by purchasing this car and breaking this sticker, you agree not to tinker with the Fuel Injectors', and stuck it to the driver side door. Now let's say the purchaser buys the car, opens the door without looking at the sticker, and then finds one of the 'good' fuel injectors at a bargain price from a junkyard, opens his hood and replaces it. Now would you expect him to be hauled off or to fined or liable in a law suit? No criminal offense was committed, and the sticker thing wouldn't hold up in court (at least it shouldn't and I believe the same should apply for the ridiculous software EULAs). In the case of the XBox, from what I hear, you don't even need to break a sticker or otherwise in any way at all have to leave any indication that you looked at the EULA. So the argument becomes even weaker.
It's ludicrous to think that breaking a sticker (without witnesses no less!) should constitute a legally binding contract. Clicking through is little better, as the user at least has a better idea at what the purpose of the dialog is, but again there are no witnesses and no unique identifier, making it impossible to ever prove a perpetrator agreed to the EULA themselves.
EULAs are stupid, all of the legitimate things they are trying to prevent are already covered by copyright law, patent law, and criminal law (as far as misuse goes). If software makers get the same priviliges as engineers of physical objects, they should operate within the same restrictions.
I would say -P input DROP or DENY if ipchains same goes for forward, and if an endstation nothing more need be done.
If it is a server with predetermined network needs, the doing the same for output is possible. Actually, even for client workstations you can at the very least limit output to tcp/udp/icmp/more as needed (i.e. ESP/AH), so a default DROP rule is good there too....
If you want to be nice at the risk of consuming upstream bandwidth and opening up a route for other bad stuff, you can use REJECT. I always use DROP, few legitimate systems get hung up on the timeouts and it really slows down a vast majority of port scanners, it also causes your system to slip below the radar for certain scanners, and they never know you're there to attempt attack.. And whatever you do, never *EVER* use MIRROR unless you really really *REALLY* understand what it does and truly know what it is doing. I had a friend who used MIRROR rule liberally, he thought it would be cute to see Script Kiddies scripts backfire on them. Well, we received an attacked with a spoofed source address. The legitimate holder of the source address was operated by CERT. Needless to say thte shit hit the fan when CERT saw what appeared to be him attempting to attack CERT, and he was disconnected from his high speed network access for a year over this in the end.
Just some very basic firewall advice, as is this forum wasn't full enough of it. I always had tight enough reigns on FORWARD and INPUT so this is not so much of an issue, as the system is not at risk for sending out this traffic, but now I think I'll add more strict output rules in case something applicable comes around.
They are not dropping support nor are they saying that support is being axed, as they have said for NT4/95. They are simply saying 9 months from now OEMs will have to ship XP and only XP. They are not forcing companies to migrate their infrastructure, they probably aren't even stopping the retail versions of XP. They are simply saying the OEM pricing of 2000 will go away. No biggie, and in this particular case their monopolistic crap is little more than a red herring. This is like any other company discontinuing production of a product, except their monopoly forces many more people to be impacted by such a decision. Even if there was a level playing ground, this would still happen.
This is objectional because XP is too intrusive and the licensing is going over the line versus 2k, and while we may lament the passing of 2k, it also is a MS product, not competition being driven out. Personally, I think wine is approaching being a valid solution for running most windows applications now when necessary, and running windows applications is becoming less and less necessary (except for games) as other viable options appear. For office applications, there is openoffice and koffice, multimedia playback and encoding has at least caught up with Windows, if not passed it (though authoring still has a way to go). For CAD apps ProE is on the way, for 3D rendering there is blender (if the engine goes open source, interfaces may be made that cater to users of other applications). Everything for getting work done is coming in one form or another.
His little test is a neat idea. The one potential cause for concenr I could see would be that he was influenced by literature praising dvorak in defining penalties for various tasks. I personally think the penalities are likely accurate, but to a QWERTY advocate, research that show dvorak is bette rby using dvorak based criteria would be begging the question...
That aside, I really agree that dvorak is a better keyboard layout, and his final layout's resemblance to dvorak testifies to the advantage of dvorak. I've never been able to type fast at al in QWERTY, and it always hurts quickly (unless I hunt and peck, which is my general method). With dvorak I can touch type comfortably for a long time, and much faster as well. While his final keyboard layout may be marginally better than dvorak, dvorak remains the better choice for much the same reason qwerty is used, you can set up a dvorak layout on almost any system and os, but with this funky layout, you need to be running X....
Probably, I know in the original movie they were just letters, and it made far more sense than this 'Jay' and 'Kay' stuff in the lenscrafter's ad campaign.
I think it is more that the organizers are more interested in what the companies are paying to be there rather than furthering the cause of linux....
For example AMD will be there. I doubt they have linux software for sale, but there to say how well Linux runs on AMD. Nothing that furthers the linux 'cause' just a company making money.
But what if I am wrong and a requirement of the expo is for a company to demonstrate products relevant to linux in order to be admitted (in the interest of keeping the expo from losing focus). Would that mean that microsoft has demonstrated something that runs on linux to push? Or as others have pointed out it might be to push.NET and mention the potential role of Linux in the vision? There is one single application I know MS has written for linux, they had written long long ago a netshow viewer for linux. It was binary only and didn't play much content, but it was meant to show they could be as cross platform as real, the then dominant player in the field. I don't think they would object to porting office to Linux if they thought enough linux users were there to make it worthwhile, I mean, they do it for Mac, and I would bet linux usage has probably at least caught up to mac in the professional workplace, MS most profitable target market.
Actually, I would say it isn't weirder that they have to stop the PCI card, just because it is in a different case doesn't mean it should be treated much differently than PC Cards.... of course most of the time you can just eject the card and the driver is good enough to recover, unless of course you are doing some sort of asyncronous IO on a drive attached to that interface... I've always viewed the "stop hardware" requirement to be more making sure the user finds out about processes with the device locked before ejecting more than anything else. Granted it actually does make it inaccessible, but it's far more important to have it catch potentially dangerous conditions before bad stuff happens.
I would say this is more flamebait, but anyway....
I would say commercial software companies understand dynamic linking fine, they are not idiots (at least my company isn't). There is nothing about the windows architecture that forces *anything* to be in a.dll file, just like linux doesn't require anything to be in a.so file. The difference is not one of architecture, both are equally well suited for dynamic linking. The difference is in the way licensing tends to work, convenience, and update ability. Companies in the windows world frequently license the use of a third party component, but they never exchange a line of source code, but instead only get API documentation and necessary.dlls. The agreement often also stipulates that redistribution is *only* permitted in the form of a dll. Also, when it comes to updates, it is easier to update individual dlls bandwidth wise than a whole application. You see linux binaries that are dynamically linked to let users try their luck with.sos too, in most cases.
- Commercial companies can understand the filesystem fine, but that doesn't mean they like it. The typical installation strategy of putting binaries, libraries, headers, and documentation in standard, shared places can make it easier on CLI users, but makes support and integratin testing/implementation a nightmare. Companies want maximum control over the install process and want to keep things in a separate directory not because they don't "get it", but because they can only test a finite number of combinations, and the more the user deviates from those tested configurations, the more potential conflicts/bugs could be exposed by exotic configurations. If their product just happens to use the same filename as another product, and the user in trying to install erases the other applications file, will get upset with the second company. Same goes with relocation and such. Many commercial Unix apps never require access outside of ~, but some do, but same goes for a few open source projects.
- That whole last paragraph smelled of pure FUD. Quite frankly I don't see much the point of UnitedLinux, but I don't think they are doing this, if for no other reason then they *know* they lack the market presence to pull it off. As mentioned in the story, Linux distributions are not the same as the Unix vendor differences, and UnitedLinux seeks to solve a largely non-existant problem.
All things aside, in the US at least, what is the punishment for a private individual or a company hijacking a satellite signal? With this in mind, is it more cost effective for a company to do it themselves or pay a fall guy an inordinate sum to hijack a satellite and enter a plea of guilty, or to legitimately buy superbowl commercial time:)
I know, it wouldn't work, the bad press that followed would be bad for most companies, (then again it might work for a beer company, or maybe apple computers...) but it is a fun thought.
The intent as I have seen it is that the MD5 sum comes from a different source than the thing being verified. For example in the portage system the md5sums are part of the tree, and distfiles are checked against those on download. Not the most ideal security, but it is a little more resiliant than putting them in one spot, that would just be pointless.
So long as there are a concentrated, trusted, experienced few through which things are distributed, then gnupg could be employed to sign files and have those distribution masters public keys distributed with a distro. Problem here is that source files come from soooo many different maintainers that there would be as many public keys as packages. Of course with gentoo, instead of the 'portage masters' running md5sums, they could run this sort of signature, so that more permament public key would be around to verify files rather than a single vulnerable md5sum.... At that point there would then be three increasingly difficult levels to compromise to fool the system...
Actually, I would say both are equally 'tough' to jail. Access to the network is pretty much the same, both tend to use particular, specific ports but circumstances can require just about anything, though IRC tends to deviate less than web browsers do from the standard ports, they still deviate.
As far as file system access, neither *truly* require write access to the disk nor read access to nothing more than a few config files. I know, browsers tend to use disk as cache and you want to download using your browser as well, but same goes for IRC, a large portion of users exchange files through the IRC client with the intent of the transferred file not being transient. For those who want to have non-transient downloads (and ability to save configuration, both sorts of clients equally likely to require this), chroot is as far as I would go.
Strictly speaking, all network applications have similar issues. While it may appear easy to pinpoint required operations of a piece of software, there are always enough deviations to make it not 100% possible to tighten it all down. The only place where you can really predict and jail based on those predictions what a network application needs to do and access is on the server end where you have the most control over how the network is used. Clients having to interoperate with oddball server configurations and users who want to use the software in different ways will always make the jailing you describe less feasible.
Of course, most any app could run fine in a chrooted environment if you have the disk space for the requisite libraries, and that by itself greatly reduces (but doesn't eliminate) threats to data outside the chroot jail.
Valid point, but saying 'GNU/Linux' needs this is *way* too broad of a topic to address. That's not much more helpful than saying 'computer oses need signed download' (here comes Palladium...).
GNU/Linux, and *any* OS for that matter has the potential to provide for this sort of thing. the GNU/Linux layers (the kernel and basic system utilities) are too low a level too require this stuff. The difference of doing it by hand as opposed to doing it with a yes/no dialog is simply a matter of a simple utility integrated into a distribution and some signatures/public keys distributed in advanced through a trusted channel. In some form or another, it is already in place for a lot of things.
For example, I use gentoo and *always* install through the portage system. The portage tree includes ebuild build description and md5sums for the ditribution files. This requires an attacker go in and compromise the portage tree and also provide/hijack distribution files for that package. Not perfect but not too shabby. The emerge process always checks MD5s.
I'm not sure if apt-get, urpmi, apt-rpm, or the FreeBSD ports systems do this, but even if they didn't it wouldn't be a huge leap to add this functionality.
Perhaps the better thing to come away from this knowing is that sometimes using package management holds the answer. Sure you can download and check signatures manually, but many don't and so having a package distribution system that forces the issue can slow issues like these drastically..
the anonymous donor, obviously Bill Gates. Now who is least likely to buy X-Boxes? Linux users/MS haters.... and now who will be snatching them up? Linux users who want 200 thousand dollars. And at the next meeting with game companies, they have a much larger apparent user base.... And it's all pointless, the 'legal' makes it impossible, I'm sure somewhere in the EULA for the X-Box it says 'by purchasing this product you agree to never ever run linux on it or else you will forfeit all your money and your first born child.
Ok, I've seen more of the demo and do see swivel, but they are still right next to each other while swivelling. You would need both to swivel *and* slide horizontally to acheive good panoramic effect. Both displays are independent though, so that is saying something, but presenting without a projector or large screen will not impress PHBs.
The ultimate point is that good multi-head setups are just not possible with a laptop set up.
Wireless security in hardware is laughable. Some cisco products are resistant to the attacks airsnort makes and some strategies can be employed to make WEP more secure, but the fundamental design is too flawed to trust. Feel free to turn on WEP but never ever expect it to buy you much of anything.
The best strategy for both data security and access control is to use IPSEC, FreeS/WAN for linux and built in IPSec for Win2k and newer. If you have to use a dedicated WAP appliance, plug it directly into a gateway interface and have the wireless network on its own subnet, probably using a privately addressable subnet, since server applications on Wireless would be stupid most of the time. That gateway only would have udp port 500 and protocol 50, maybe 51 open, and the rest of the traffic coming in plain from the WEP get's dropped immediately. Now you are both forcing users to use secure transport level methods *and* preventing unauthorized use by those who do not have keys on the gateway. I'm not sure what certification it meets, but it is a proven, trusted technology as opposed to the "Wiretap Equivalent Protocol". Of course if the devices are very mobile and likely to be accessible from a public place or stolen, then you need to also have people use application level security to make sure the data is kept secret. At the endstations as well as while in transit.
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Dunno about general tags but try using some png files with an alpha channel without providing an alternative for IE users that specifies that stupid directx alphaimageloader crap.
The problem here is that users see these problems on a web page. If it simply doesn't look good, they think 'wow, this site is so crappy, what stupid web developers' rather than blame their browser. In the case that the site intentionally looks fubared on IE and there is a prominent, clear statement and explanation, a user thinks 'the web developer is elitist and won't support my browser, and I know full well a site can do this stuff on IE because other sites do!'. The user could care less about standards and anyone else's experience aside from their own. If they see a bad website, they go to a similar, but different website that does look fine. Political agendas don't matter to a user unless the agenda is being pushed to someone who already believes.
For example, when you see a company website that renders poorly in mozilla, and a comparable website renders well, do you fire up IE to cater to the 'bad' site, or do you take your business to the place that caters more to your experience rather than their implied agenda of 'IE is dominant, other stuff is BS'. You go to the mozilla site, and the IE user would do the same to any site with an 'IE is bad' agenda.
Arg, the analogy is not only flawed, but useless, murder was not requsite for the end task to happen. The act of getting the discman back is legal, the murder would not.
In applying the principals to the XBox case at hand, the act of running linux on the box is legal. However, the *possible* offense would be the modding, not how the modding is used. EULA in relation to the XBox is probably not enforcable, but the DMCA may still apply, since the modchip would most likely be viewed as a circumvention device. MS would never pursue someone for modchipping their XBox for the express purpose of running linux, as this would introduce the possibility of the DMCA being shot down (same as when Adobe stopped trying to get that guy). We have a very clear, real set of circumstances in which no copyright would be violated, but the person would be afowl of copyright law anyway.
Well, for one, does it make playing of import games or dvds possible? At that point you could argue the design of the chip had the necessary side-effect of circumvention to accomplish the projects goals of playing european DVDs.
I personally think the DMCA should be repealed (same as you), it completely spits in the face of fair use and rubs it into the ground. I want to make backups of what I play and store the originals. The companies have repeatedly proven they are not up to the task of replacing defective, lost, or stolen media, especially after the obsolecence of the product or after the company goes bust. I have a modchipped playstation and I play my own copies of my games which are immediately put back in the cases and stored away, because I like to collect the stuff as well as play it. Punish the people copying and distributing copies illegally, do not punish those who excercise their right to fair use.
The DMCA would probably not stand up in the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, the cases relevant are civil cases and as such the prosecuting party can opt to drop suit at any time. Because of this combination, we regularly see the big companies back off of cases where the defense can afford to go to the Supreme Court and it looks likely that it could happen. The big companies know their preciousssss DMCA is on extremely shaky ground and don't want to rock the boat.
What I want to see is a party develop a crappy protection procedure and use it with the express intent of another, cooperating party circumventing it. Then the two escalate with minimal legal costs the issue as high as it can go in hopes of reaching the supreme court. Repeat until some measure of success is had.
Replace all occurences of MPH to MPG, to make it actually make sense. But the same could go for MPH, so long as you don't break laws after such a modifications.
Your argument is so strange and completely orthogonal to the issue at hand.
You are trying to get people to see how this would be valid in a car situation, and why we wouldn't argue with it. The hypothetical kids would have been arrested for speeding and driving without a license. They probably wouldn't go to jail, but to even suggest the possibility you admit that the offenses for which they are being punished would be criminal, not civil (as breaking EULA would be civil). In this scenario they were punished for speeding, reckless driving, whatever.
Let's modify this scenario to say the good car got 200 MPH (radically different Fuel Injection, let's say for sake of argument) but the base model got 5 MPH and they printed on a sticker saying 'by purchasing this car and breaking this sticker, you agree not to tinker with the Fuel Injectors', and stuck it to the driver side door. Now let's say the purchaser buys the car, opens the door without looking at the sticker, and then finds one of the 'good' fuel injectors at a bargain price from a junkyard, opens his hood and replaces it. Now would you expect him to be hauled off or to fined or liable in a law suit? No criminal offense was committed, and the sticker thing wouldn't hold up in court (at least it shouldn't and I believe the same should apply for the ridiculous software EULAs). In the case of the XBox, from what I hear, you don't even need to break a sticker or otherwise in any way at all have to leave any indication that you looked at the EULA. So the argument becomes even weaker.
It's ludicrous to think that breaking a sticker (without witnesses no less!) should constitute a legally binding contract. Clicking through is little better, as the user at least has a better idea at what the purpose of the dialog is, but again there are no witnesses and no unique identifier, making it impossible to ever prove a perpetrator agreed to the EULA themselves.
EULAs are stupid, all of the legitimate things they are trying to prevent are already covered by copyright law, patent law, and criminal law (as far as misuse goes). If software makers get the same priviliges as engineers of physical objects, they should operate within the same restrictions.
whoops, too early in the morning, first sentence repeated itself...
I would say -P input DROP
or DENY if ipchains
same goes for forward, and if an endstation nothing more need be done.
If it is a server with predetermined network needs, the doing the same for output is possible. Actually, even for client workstations you can at the very least limit output to tcp/udp/icmp/more as needed (i.e. ESP/AH), so a default DROP rule is good there too....
If you want to be nice at the risk of consuming upstream bandwidth and opening up a route for other bad stuff, you can use REJECT. I always use DROP, few legitimate systems get hung up on the timeouts and it really slows down a vast majority of port scanners, it also causes your system to slip below the radar for certain scanners, and they never know you're there to attempt attack.. And whatever you do, never *EVER* use MIRROR unless you really really *REALLY* understand what it does and truly know what it is doing. I had a friend who used MIRROR rule liberally, he thought it would be cute to see Script Kiddies scripts backfire on them. Well, we received an attacked with a spoofed source address. The legitimate holder of the source address was operated by CERT. Needless to say thte shit hit the fan when CERT saw what appeared to be him attempting to attack CERT, and he was disconnected from his high speed network access for a year over this in the end.
Just some very basic firewall advice, as is this forum wasn't full enough of it. I always had tight enough reigns on FORWARD and INPUT so this is not so much of an issue, as the system is not at risk for sending out this traffic, but now I think I'll add more strict output rules in case something applicable comes around.
They are not dropping support nor are they saying that support is being axed, as they have said for NT4/95. They are simply saying 9 months from now OEMs will have to ship XP and only XP. They are not forcing companies to migrate their infrastructure, they probably aren't even stopping the retail versions of XP. They are simply saying the OEM pricing of 2000 will go away. No biggie, and in this particular case their monopolistic crap is little more than a red herring. This is like any other company discontinuing production of a product, except their monopoly forces many more people to be impacted by such a decision. Even if there was a level playing ground, this would still happen.
This is objectional because XP is too intrusive and the licensing is going over the line versus 2k, and while we may lament the passing of 2k, it also is a MS product, not competition being driven out. Personally, I think wine is approaching being a valid solution for running most windows applications now when necessary, and running windows applications is becoming less and less necessary (except for games) as other viable options appear. For office applications, there is openoffice and koffice, multimedia playback and encoding has at least caught up with Windows, if not passed it (though authoring still has a way to go). For CAD apps ProE is on the way, for 3D rendering there is blender (if the engine goes open source, interfaces may be made that cater to users of other applications). Everything for getting work done is coming in one form or another.
BTW, I was typing in QWERTY when I posted this, ergo all the typos :)
His little test is a neat idea. The one potential cause for concenr I could see would be that he was influenced by literature praising dvorak in defining penalties for various tasks. I personally think the penalities are likely accurate, but to a QWERTY advocate, research that show dvorak is bette rby using dvorak based criteria would be begging the question...
That aside, I really agree that dvorak is a better keyboard layout, and his final layout's resemblance to dvorak testifies to the advantage of dvorak. I've never been able to type fast at al in QWERTY, and it always hurts quickly (unless I hunt and peck, which is my general method). With dvorak I can touch type comfortably for a long time, and much faster as well. While his final keyboard layout may be marginally better than dvorak, dvorak remains the better choice for much the same reason qwerty is used, you can set up a dvorak layout on almost any system and os, but with this funky layout, you need to be running X....
Probably, I know in the original movie they were just letters, and it made far more sense than this 'Jay' and 'Kay' stuff in the lenscrafter's ad campaign.
Interestingly enough, "Jay" and "Kay" is the way it is written in a number of places, go to a neighborhood lenscrafters if you don't believe me...
I think it is more that the organizers are more interested in what the companies are paying to be there rather than furthering the cause of linux....
.NET and mention the potential role of Linux in the vision? There is one single application I know MS has written for linux, they had written long long ago a netshow viewer for linux. It was binary only and didn't play much content, but it was meant to show they could be as cross platform as real, the then dominant player in the field. I don't think they would object to porting office to Linux if they thought enough linux users were there to make it worthwhile, I mean, they do it for Mac, and I would bet linux usage has probably at least caught up to mac in the professional workplace, MS most profitable target market.
For example AMD will be there. I doubt they have linux software for sale, but there to say how well Linux runs on AMD. Nothing that furthers the linux 'cause' just a company making money.
But what if I am wrong and a requirement of the expo is for a company to demonstrate products relevant to linux in order to be admitted (in the interest of keeping the expo from losing focus). Would that mean that microsoft has demonstrated something that runs on linux to push? Or as others have pointed out it might be to push
Actually, I would say it isn't weirder that they have to stop the PCI card, just because it is in a different case doesn't mean it should be treated much differently than PC Cards.... of course most of the time you can just eject the card and the driver is good enough to recover, unless of course you are doing some sort of asyncronous IO on a drive attached to that interface... I've always viewed the "stop hardware" requirement to be more making sure the user finds out about processes with the device locked before ejecting more than anything else. Granted it actually does make it inaccessible, but it's far more important to have it catch potentially dangerous conditions before bad stuff happens.
I would say this is more flamebait, but anyway....
.dll file, just like linux doesn't require anything to be in a .so file. The difference is not one of architecture, both are equally well suited for dynamic linking. The difference is in the way licensing tends to work, convenience, and update ability. Companies in the windows world frequently license the use of a third party component, but they never exchange a line of source code, but instead only get API documentation and necessary .dlls. The agreement often also stipulates that redistribution is *only* permitted in the form of a dll. Also, when it comes to updates, it is easier to update individual dlls bandwidth wise than a whole application. You see linux binaries that are dynamically linked to let users try their luck with .sos too, in most cases.
I would say commercial software companies understand dynamic linking fine, they are not idiots (at least my company isn't). There is nothing about the windows architecture that forces *anything* to be in a
- Commercial companies can understand the filesystem fine, but that doesn't mean they like it. The typical installation strategy of putting binaries, libraries, headers, and documentation in standard, shared places can make it easier on CLI users, but makes support and integratin testing/implementation a nightmare. Companies want maximum control over the install process and want to keep things in a separate directory not because they don't "get it", but because they can only test a finite number of combinations, and the more the user deviates from those tested configurations, the more potential conflicts/bugs could be exposed by exotic configurations. If their product just happens to use the same filename as another product, and the user in trying to install erases the other applications file, will get upset with the second company. Same goes with relocation and such. Many commercial Unix apps never require access outside of ~, but some do, but same goes for a few open source projects.
- That whole last paragraph smelled of pure FUD. Quite frankly I don't see much the point of UnitedLinux, but I don't think they are doing this, if for no other reason then they *know* they lack the market presence to pull it off. As mentioned in the story, Linux distributions are not the same as the Unix vendor differences, and UnitedLinux seeks to solve a largely non-existant problem.
All things aside, in the US at least, what is the punishment for a private individual or a company hijacking a satellite signal? With this in mind, is it more cost effective for a company to do it themselves or pay a fall guy an inordinate sum to hijack a satellite and enter a plea of guilty, or to legitimately buy superbowl commercial time :)
I know, it wouldn't work, the bad press that followed would be bad for most companies, (then again it might work for a beer company, or maybe apple computers...) but it is a fun thought.
I'm more struck by the coolness of the shortening of Washington University to Washu,of Tenchi fame :)
The intent as I have seen it is that the MD5 sum comes from a different source than the thing being verified. For example in the portage system the md5sums are part of the tree, and distfiles are checked against those on download. Not the most ideal security, but it is a little more resiliant than putting them in one spot, that would just be pointless.
So long as there are a concentrated, trusted, experienced few through which things are distributed, then gnupg could be employed to sign files and have those distribution masters public keys distributed with a distro. Problem here is that source files come from soooo many different maintainers that there would be as many public keys as packages. Of course with gentoo, instead of the 'portage masters' running md5sums, they could run this sort of signature, so that more permament public key would be around to verify files rather than a single vulnerable md5sum.... At that point there would then be three increasingly difficult levels to compromise to fool the system...
Actually, I would say both are equally 'tough' to jail. Access to the network is pretty much the same, both tend to use particular, specific ports but circumstances can require just about anything, though IRC tends to deviate less than web browsers do from the standard ports, they still deviate.
As far as file system access, neither *truly* require write access to the disk nor read access to nothing more than a few config files. I know, browsers tend to use disk as cache and you want to download using your browser as well, but same goes for IRC, a large portion of users exchange files through the IRC client with the intent of the transferred file not being transient. For those who want to have non-transient downloads (and ability to save configuration, both sorts of clients equally likely to require this), chroot is as far as I would go.
Strictly speaking, all network applications have similar issues. While it may appear easy to pinpoint required operations of a piece of software, there are always enough deviations to make it not 100% possible to tighten it all down. The only place where you can really predict and jail based on those predictions what a network application needs to do and access is on the server end where you have the most control over how the network is used. Clients having to interoperate with oddball server configurations and users who want to use the software in different ways will always make the jailing you describe less feasible.
Of course, most any app could run fine in a chrooted environment if you have the disk space for the requisite libraries, and that by itself greatly reduces (but doesn't eliminate) threats to data outside the chroot jail.
Obviously the cause is marketing, but it may be made feasible by the factors you mention.
Valid point, but saying 'GNU/Linux' needs this is *way* too broad of a topic to address. That's not much more helpful than saying 'computer oses need signed download' (here comes Palladium...).
GNU/Linux, and *any* OS for that matter has the potential to provide for this sort of thing. the GNU/Linux layers (the kernel and basic system utilities) are too low a level too require this stuff. The difference of doing it by hand as opposed to doing it with a yes/no dialog is simply a matter of a simple utility integrated into a distribution and some signatures/public keys distributed in advanced through a trusted channel. In some form or another, it is already in place for a lot of things.
For example, I use gentoo and *always* install through the portage system. The portage tree includes ebuild build description and md5sums for the ditribution files. This requires an attacker go in and compromise the portage tree and also provide/hijack distribution files for that package. Not perfect but not too shabby. The emerge process always checks MD5s.
I'm not sure if apt-get, urpmi, apt-rpm, or the FreeBSD ports systems do this, but even if they didn't it wouldn't be a huge leap to add this functionality.
Perhaps the better thing to come away from this knowing is that sometimes using package management holds the answer. Sure you can download and check signatures manually, but many don't and so having a package distribution system that forces the issue can slow issues like these drastically..
the anonymous donor, obviously Bill Gates. Now who is least likely to buy X-Boxes? Linux users/MS haters.... and now who will be snatching them up? Linux users who want 200 thousand dollars. And at the next meeting with game companies, they have a much larger apparent user base.... And it's all pointless, the 'legal' makes it impossible, I'm sure somewhere in the EULA for the X-Box it says 'by purchasing this product you agree to never ever run linux on it or else you will forfeit all your money and your first born child.
Obligatory "Imagine a beowulf cluster..." post goes here....
Ok, I've seen more of the demo and do see swivel, but they are still right next to each other while swivelling. You would need both to swivel *and* slide horizontally to acheive good panoramic effect. Both displays are independent though, so that is saying something, but presenting without a projector or large screen will not impress PHBs.
The ultimate point is that good multi-head setups are just not possible with a laptop set up.
Wireless security in hardware is laughable. Some cisco products are resistant to the attacks airsnort makes and some strategies can be employed to make WEP more secure, but the fundamental design is too flawed to trust. Feel free to turn on WEP but never ever expect it to buy you much of anything.
The best strategy for both data security and access control is to use IPSEC, FreeS/WAN for linux and built in IPSec for Win2k and newer. If you have to use a dedicated WAP appliance, plug it directly into a gateway interface and have the wireless network on its own subnet, probably using a privately addressable subnet, since server applications on Wireless would be stupid most of the time. That gateway only would have udp port 500 and protocol 50, maybe 51 open, and the rest of the traffic coming in plain from the WEP get's dropped immediately. Now you are both forcing users to use secure transport level methods *and* preventing unauthorized use by those who do not have keys on the gateway. I'm not sure what certification it meets, but it is a proven, trusted technology as opposed to the "Wiretap Equivalent Protocol". Of course if the devices are very mobile and likely to be accessible from a public place or stolen, then you need to also have people use application level security to make sure the data is kept secret. At the endstations as well as while in transit.