The fact that a bunch of people on a message boards both supported and opposed you does not make you any less wrong and unqualified to give advice about incident response.
Aside from losing what is stored in physical memory
I can't imagine a system that would actually preserve that without truly obscene cost. Also unless finding the source of attack is much more important than recovery (what is almost never the case in real life), it's usually worthless. The only exception to this is compromised virtual environment running on a clean physical host.
and chancing your swap file being over written/purged, many root kits will remove themselves when the system is rebooted to avoid detection(why stay and leave evidence if I know I can hack it anytime I want). You are better off unplugging the network cable and making a exact duplicate of the file system/dumping memory if you can, and running some known good system binaries, such as process viewers to get a snap shot of what is running(screen captures are good to get, when applicable). If you can, have known good linked libraries available just incase it is corrupted on the current system.
No. Nothing should ever be run by an admin on a compromised system, period. Most important, he shouldn't ever enter a password on it that gives any kind of privileged access. If the system has networked storage on a non-compromised server, storage should be cleanly disconnected. If it doesn't, system should go through the fastest shutdown procedure possible, and if it requires entering a password, network should be disconnected before that. If the local storage is likely to survive power-off, it the machine should be simply powered down, and all recovery procedures should run from a clean environment. If the host should be cleanly shut down, having a rootkit produce MORE changes if shut down is a negligible risk because rootkit was already there and could react on anything -- disappearing network connection, serial port activity, time of the day -- trying to affect those things is a distraction from the recovery work.
1. Keep the suits and incompetent people the hell out!
Once a compromise happened, there is no time to listen to lawyers or marketing executives. If they have anything to say, they would write a document where they list all recommendations they can care about -- for example, how "This site is pwn3d" web page is supposed to look like, whether it is a good thing to send all users a letter "please cancel your credit card", or what information can be released to authorities. If they didn't do that already, let them write those things while sysadmins are working.
This, of course, means that if there is only one sysadmin competent enough to investigate and fix the problem, then he would have to work on it alone.
2. Shut it down and investigate changes made by the attackers.
Before doing any investigation or recovery, shut the compromised and potentially compromised devices down. No malicious code should remain running. Whatever services should remain, must run in the minimal mode on separate hardware. For example, keep email running on a newly installed box. All investigation should be done in a clean environment -- drives moved to dedicated "clean" machines, or original servers booted from clean images (CD, PXE, replacement drives) on a private subnet, not accessible to anyone but people involved in incident response. Make full images of compromised hosts' storage whenever possible.
Backups are your friend. IDS logs are, too, but make sure that your IDS isn't compromised, and actually recorded something meaningful.
3. Don't worry about the person who originated the the attack.
Find its results and, if possible, method. Likely there will be at least one person within the company (malicious or more likely negligent) and at least one outside. Screw them both, they don't have access to your network anymore because it's off.
4. Immediately restore known-clean backups, perform audit on potentially compromised data and update the systems.
Backup is "known-clean" if investigation shown that it is from a state before the attack and does not contain vulnerable versions of software or compromised authentication information that allowed attack to happen. Usually some data has to be restored from a compromised system because it's more recent than backup (or because you are an idiot and forgot to back it up). Audits are supposed to be painful. Once data is in place, update software and configuration. Erase all compromised authentication keys and tokens.
5. Document the process.
I mean, technical details.
6. Tell everyone that they are screwed.
Explain to every office drone that they are going to get new passwords. They won't like it, so keep your LART ready.
1. Russian engineers _REALLY_ suck at marketing. It may be a good thing for Russian economy, too, judging by how modern marketing allowed huge amounts of unimaginable crap to worm its way into consumers' lives. I am a Russian engineer, and I suck at marketing, though I am in US and therefore it's a bad thing for me.
2. Software patents aren't exactly a great thing now, and they certainly weren't in 80's. Copyright and trademark could protect the game implementation though, but protection of them were very weak in USSR. Pajitnov couldn't benefit much from domestic distribution of the game because at that time there were too few computers and too many software pirates, so the only thing where he was screwed was selling the game abroad. However since he was an employee, it would be just as bad in US.
3. Most of inventions made in US end up not being worth the patent application fees, and companies fail all the time. From the technology development point of view any innovation made in a large, Soviet-style state-sponsored organization has better chances to see successful implementation because bureaucrats are interested in their superiors seeing an improvement in that organization's output, but are free to spend vast amounts of resources as long as the results are visible. So even in the short term the invention's result is financially negative, it is positive for overseeing bureaucrats' reputation.
In Capitalist system it's more likely to fail unless it's a part of established development program -- the invention either does not promise immediate monetary benefit, or can't be implemented within the narrow business model of a company, forcing the inventor on a risky path of creating his own company from scratch. Obviously failures are never known to the public unless company has some initial success.
4. What is good for the military not necessarily is so for the public -- acceptable safety and required level of training are different. This was especially important for Soviet military considering that it actually had to defend the country few decades ago, so safety of a soldier had to be balanced against adequate protection for the rest of 300 millions of people populating it. In US, where before 2003 military was seen as some kind of government-provided high-paying job for unskilled and poor people, it would be strange to expect any lowering of safety standard even if it helped in purely hypothetical case when such a military actually had to fight a well-armed and organized enemy.
This doesn't mean that mechanical boots can't be developed into a safe and efficient device fit for civilian use. However an example of another, obviously well-developed, safe and (as opposed to boots) designed for a modern city device, Segway scooter, is an example that the market for those things is pretty bad to begin with.
Once a proper watermark is agreed upon, then more automated controls can be put in place to identify and take actions as necessary if you have copyrighted material to protect. The real trick is to make the technology available to everyone, not just the big companies companies involved with most media. I agree with you though, you should cancel your cable and spend more time on/. or buy a book.
Once a proper watermark is agreed upon, it's useless. Watermarks are similar to steganography, they are only effective if the method for making and checking them is secret.
And there is a hidden benefit here. You know how Thomson is saying "if consumers know the watermark is there, they'll be disincented to pirate videos"?
More like the other way around. A person knows that if he will record a movie from his own cable, it will carry his watermark, so if it ever for any reason will end up accessible on a public network, he will be sued. On the other hand, if he will download a pirated copy, he shouldn't worry about it getting out -- at worst it has pirate's watermark.
Result: time-shifting cable is unsafe, getting movies from pirates is safe. Since no one in his right mind would watch TV at the timeslots assigned to movies and shows by network executives, why would anyone other than pirates subscribe to cable at all?
If a device sold to the user to perform non-threatening and legitimate activity can include something specifically designed to compromise user's privacy, then the device acts as an agent of copyright holder or of a government. This is fraud, police state or fascism, depending on how much government and companies are involved in exploiting the collected information.
If the charges can't distribute themselves to the lowest-energy configuration, it means that higher potential difference corresponds to the same charge, what means your capacitance is lower. Same happens when you pull the capacitor's conductors to put thicker dielectric between them -- charge is the same, energy is added therefore capacitance is lower.
It will be the same as in vacuum tubes and CRTs -- spikes themselves won't do much, but you can heat up the cathode, and create some electric field with anode -- electrons will be emitted, some of them will be captured by anode, the rest will escape the device, leaving it positively charged. As long as anode is positive relative to cathode, electron cannon will work. You can lose electrons until the point when you are so positively charged that all electrons that left the cannon have less energy that it is necessary to leave the spaceship.
Or you can make a source of positively or negatively charged ions -- they can be accelerated in a similar way. Again, this probably can be much easier achieved by messing with an ion engine, under/over compensating the positively charged ions that leave the engine.
Competitive sports at school == pointless drama, encouragement of intellectual deficiency, deterioration of social environment, and discouragement of healthy physical activity. Just look at the US schools.
...and to make it even more clear -- no, charges do not get evenly distributed along the surface. They repel each other to the end of the filaments, and ends of the filaments repel from each other, forming a sphere.
Corona in a gas is easy to produce because gas can be ionized by strong electric field along the spike or fiber, giving you a lot of charged particles to carry your discharge current. In vacuum you have nothing but those electrons that are already in metal -- you can emit them if you are negatively charged, and can't emit anything if you are positively charged (think of it as a giant diode tube). Even if you emit electrons, you have to move very fast so magnetic field will divert them away from you, and once you are sufficiently positively charged, emission will stop.
Most likely at best this will produce a cloud of electrons following a positively charged spaceship, so forces that magnetic field applies to both will almost completely compensate each other. With radioactive source of charged particles (positively or negatively charged), or electron cannon you can produce more charge on the spacecraft, and probably it can be combined with ion engine that produces charged particles anyway.
Equipotential surface does not need a conductor along it. Drill a hole in a metal sphere on a Van de Graaf generator, and it will make no difference except for immediate edges, the potential in the center of the hole will be approximately the same as it was when there was metal in it.
But the amount of charge held by a sphere at a given voltage, a quantity known as its capacitance, is not very large. Long, thin filaments, on the other hand, have a lot of charge-holding surface area, so one possible design involves many filaments attached to the spacecraft. The setup would have a rather comical look - because of the static charge, the filaments would stick out in all directions, like newly brushed dry hair.
Where did those people study Physics? It doesn't work that way.
The only surface area that matters is an equipotential surface, so in the case of "filaments sticking in all directions" it will be a roughly spherical surface formed by the ends of filaments. Within this sphere there is almost no electric field -- filaments can be seen as a kind of lightning rods, except there is no lightning because they are in vacuum. So at best they will have a larger sphere, at worst a cigar or other shape with less surface area. If one has to build a large but light sphere, he can make it out of the wire mesh -- in vacuum it won't discharge like it would in the air, where those spheres have to be smooth. Filaments or spikes can be useful for acceleration of charged particles.
As for usefulness of the whole thing, I guess, you can use this for steering the spaceship, however the analogy to surfing is very poor. Surfboards can accelerate by absorbing the energy of waves moving from deep to shallow water. This thing flies through a stable magnetic field, steering by changing its electric charge. A better analogy would be a sailboat changing tacks, with gravity acting as a wind and magnetic field as water resistance.
This only happens when frequency is set manually, and in recent X versions it is only necessary for some unusual, non-standard configurations -- same as with Windows (I have last time edited a modeline when connecting an old Sun monitor that didn't even have a VGA connector on its cable). Modern monitors usually display a giant floating "FREQUENCY OUT OF RANGE", "UNSUPPORTED VIDEO MODE" or similar message when this happens. Ctrl Alt + and Ctrl Alt - allow the user to cycle through resolutions, so he usually doesn't even lose graphics, he just sees a large scrolly desktop. However even if the user managed to replace the video card and keep the previously configured "unusual" monitor, it will just set the same mode (though the card may refuse to support it -- but then same would happen on Windows, user will have to reset to the minimal mode and go from there either way). Those things would be beyond the newbie's abilities to configure on any OS, so he would have to reset the configuration and settle for one of the default video modes.
7. Screen goes into power saving mode 8. Press ctrl-alt-backspace to kill X (you knew how to do that already, right?) 9. Pull out your *other* computer (you have one of those, right?) and google for help. Ignore all helpful suggestions to "RTFM n00b".
I call bullshit.
1. In no possible situation a graphics card can go into a power-saving mode when you run a wrong driver. You need some ancient ISA graphics card to even make it possible for the wrong driver to TRY to access it -- otherwise PCI IDs won't match, and X will exit with failure.
2. If X server is running on any modern Linux distro, Ctrl-Alt-Backspace will merely restart it -- it's started from display manager. If X server failed multiple times, display manager gives you an error in text dialog box, and stops trying. You will see a text login prompt.
3. If X server does not fail, switch to console is Ctrl-Alt-F1.
4. You can always change display driver to "vesa" and use your graphics card in compatibility mode. As opposed to Windows it won't drop you into 640x480, either.
And since only a moron or Windows shill wouldn't know that, I recommend you to shut up.
Microsoft Office is the worst format for any kind of organized workflow -- it's designed for random ad-hoc editing, that can only be safely done within an organization. Even ODF is better for that purpose, though usually some other XML-based format is made specifically for those things.
If two guys are mining copper with no economy around them, they produce a worthless product. If there are more people involved, usually it's an economy where miners get royally screwed regardless of the amount of money they get.
Of course, most of "advanced Photoshop users" that still passionately demand CMYK support in Gimp never did anything that actually needed it (hint: printer drivers don't need it in the application).
hhh, the standard response from open source zealots when someone speaks the truth. Sorry, but I will not shut up. I will continue to point out that which is obvious -- that most OSS is a poor imitation of *real* products. And given time I will also continue to provide detailed, verifiable reasons why OSS is inferior, such as I have in this thread. Happily, the gulf is so large, it rarely takes more than a few minutes to find a gaping hole in any given OSS application's functionality.
I see, you have spent a lot of time trying to justify your positions by cherry-picked scenarios and generalization with no evidence. If this is all that such a resourceful person can present in a desperate attempt to support his point of view, I think, Open Source software is doing great.
It certainly did. Many computer-literate people, myself included, recommend others specifically WRT54G (or similar router) with DD-WRT or other third-party firmware, as opposed to routers that can only use its vendors' firmware. Linksys even sells a more expensive WRT54GL with more RAM and flash (like v1-v4) for people who use larger configurations.
If Linksys originally developed its current v5-v6 firmware, their product would be inferior, and users who wanted anything better than that would have to buy a much more expensive model. Even taking into account that Linksys is now owned by Cisco, one of the companies that produces "more expensive models", there would be a huge gap between their cheap and expensive wireless routers, so many users wouldn't buy either. Third-party firmware elevated the quality of cheap WRT54G to the level needed for more demanding applications (Bittorrent, games), complex NAT/forwarding/DMZ configurations, large networks, VPN, even some VoIP telephony. Lucky for Linksys/Cisco, this covered exactly the range where their other products weren't. Of course, being full of idiots, Linksys management refused to make the next logical step and sell WRT54G with third-party firmware preinstalled, however they still benefited from it.
While you might say open source code should see the same rigor, it usually doesn't because it's gratis and can be taken from one internal project to the other without issues.
This is baseless. Developers never have to pay when they use closed code within the company, yet they are aware that they can't just stuff it into everything when the license prohibits it, may require unacceptable royalties, etc. If anything, developers are usually less aware of the details of commercial licenses because those licenses are usually completely unreadable, and managers don't explain to developers any details of potential royalties and other costs involved. On the other hand, BSD license is very short, and the text of GPL mostly consists of explanations why and how it is supposed to be used. Very difficult to miss any details.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that a bunch of people on a message boards both supported and opposed you does not make you any less wrong and unqualified to give advice about incident response.
Aside from losing what is stored in physical memory
I can't imagine a system that would actually preserve that without truly obscene cost. Also unless finding the source of attack is much more important than recovery (what is almost never the case in real life), it's usually worthless. The only exception to this is compromised virtual environment running on a clean physical host.
and chancing your swap file being over written/purged, many root kits will remove themselves when the system is rebooted to avoid detection(why stay and leave evidence if I know I can hack it anytime I want). You are better off unplugging the network cable and making a exact duplicate of the file system/dumping memory if you can, and running some known good system binaries, such as process viewers to get a snap shot of what is running(screen captures are good to get, when applicable). If you can, have known good linked libraries available just incase it is corrupted on the current system.
No. Nothing should ever be run by an admin on a compromised system, period. Most important, he shouldn't ever enter a password on it that gives any kind of privileged access. If the system has networked storage on a non-compromised server, storage should be cleanly disconnected. If it doesn't, system should go through the fastest shutdown procedure possible, and if it requires entering a password, network should be disconnected before that. If the local storage is likely to survive power-off, it the machine should be simply powered down, and all recovery procedures should run from a clean environment. If the host should be cleanly shut down, having a rootkit produce MORE changes if shut down is a negligible risk because rootkit was already there and could react on anything -- disappearing network connection, serial port activity, time of the day -- trying to affect those things is a distraction from the recovery work.
1. Keep the suits and incompetent people the hell out!
Once a compromise happened, there is no time to listen to lawyers or marketing executives. If they have anything to say, they would write a document where they list all recommendations they can care about -- for example, how "This site is pwn3d" web page is supposed to look like, whether it is a good thing to send all users a letter "please cancel your credit card", or what information can be released to authorities. If they didn't do that already, let them write those things while sysadmins are working.
This, of course, means that if there is only one sysadmin competent enough to investigate and fix the problem, then he would have to work on it alone.
2. Shut it down and investigate changes made by the attackers.
Before doing any investigation or recovery, shut the compromised and potentially compromised devices down. No malicious code should remain running. Whatever services should remain, must run in the minimal mode on separate hardware. For example, keep email running on a newly installed box. All investigation should be done in a clean environment -- drives moved to dedicated "clean" machines, or original servers booted from clean images (CD, PXE, replacement drives) on a private subnet, not accessible to anyone but people involved in incident response. Make full images of compromised hosts' storage whenever possible.
Backups are your friend. IDS logs are, too, but make sure that your IDS isn't compromised, and actually recorded something meaningful.
3. Don't worry about the person who originated the the attack.
Find its results and, if possible, method. Likely there will be at least one person within the company (malicious or more likely negligent) and at least one outside. Screw them both, they don't have access to your network anymore because it's off.
4. Immediately restore known-clean backups, perform audit on potentially compromised data and update the systems.
Backup is "known-clean" if investigation shown that it is from a state before the attack and does not contain vulnerable versions of software or compromised authentication information that allowed attack to happen. Usually some data has to be restored from a compromised system because it's more recent than backup (or because you are an idiot and forgot to back it up). Audits are supposed to be painful. Once data is in place, update software and configuration. Erase all compromised authentication keys and tokens.
5. Document the process.
I mean, technical details.
6. Tell everyone that they are screwed.
Explain to every office drone that they are going to get new passwords. They won't like it, so keep your LART ready.
Oh, btw:
http://abelits.livejournal.com/30214.html
http://abelits.livejournal.com/30681.html
http://abelits.livejournal.com/30872.html
1. Russian engineers _REALLY_ suck at marketing. It may be a good thing for Russian economy, too, judging by how modern marketing allowed huge amounts of unimaginable crap to worm its way into consumers' lives. I am a Russian engineer, and I suck at marketing, though I am in US and therefore it's a bad thing for me.
2. Software patents aren't exactly a great thing now, and they certainly weren't in 80's. Copyright and trademark could protect the game implementation though, but protection of them were very weak in USSR. Pajitnov couldn't benefit much from domestic distribution of the game because at that time there were too few computers and too many software pirates, so the only thing where he was screwed was selling the game abroad. However since he was an employee, it would be just as bad in US.
3. Most of inventions made in US end up not being worth the patent application fees, and companies fail all the time. From the technology development point of view any innovation made in a large, Soviet-style state-sponsored organization has better chances to see successful implementation because bureaucrats are interested in their superiors seeing an improvement in that organization's output, but are free to spend vast amounts of resources as long as the results are visible. So even in the short term the invention's result is financially negative, it is positive for overseeing bureaucrats' reputation.
In Capitalist system it's more likely to fail unless it's a part of established development program -- the invention either does not promise immediate monetary benefit, or can't be implemented within the narrow business model of a company, forcing the inventor on a risky path of creating his own company from scratch. Obviously failures are never known to the public unless company has some initial success.
4. What is good for the military not necessarily is so for the public -- acceptable safety and required level of training are different. This was especially important for Soviet military considering that it actually had to defend the country few decades ago, so safety of a soldier had to be balanced against adequate protection for the rest of 300 millions of people populating it. In US, where before 2003 military was seen as some kind of government-provided high-paying job for unskilled and poor people, it would be strange to expect any lowering of safety standard even if it helped in purely hypothetical case when such a military actually had to fight a well-armed and organized enemy.
This doesn't mean that mechanical boots can't be developed into a safe and efficient device fit for civilian use. However an example of another, obviously well-developed, safe and (as opposed to boots) designed for a modern city device, Segway scooter, is an example that the market for those things is pretty bad to begin with.
Your guess is right. The actor playing Long John Silver in this movie started this "pirate dialect" tradition that included "arr" and "matey".
Once a proper watermark is agreed upon, it's useless. Watermarks are similar to steganography, they are only effective if the method for making and checking them is secret.
More like the other way around. A person knows that if he will record a movie from his own cable, it will carry his watermark, so if it ever for any reason will end up accessible on a public network, he will be sued. On the other hand, if he will download a pirated copy, he shouldn't worry about it getting out -- at worst it has pirate's watermark.
Result: time-shifting cable is unsafe, getting movies from pirates is safe. Since no one in his right mind would watch TV at the timeslots assigned to movies and shows by network executives, why would anyone other than pirates subscribe to cable at all?
If a device sold to the user to perform non-threatening and legitimate activity can include something specifically designed to compromise user's privacy, then the device acts as an agent of copyright holder or of a government. This is fraud, police state or fascism, depending on how much government and companies are involved in exploiting the collected information.
If the charges can't distribute themselves to the lowest-energy configuration, it means that higher potential difference corresponds to the same charge, what means your capacitance is lower. Same happens when you pull the capacitor's conductors to put thicker dielectric between them -- charge is the same, energy is added therefore capacitance is lower.
It will be the same as in vacuum tubes and CRTs -- spikes themselves won't do much, but you can heat up the cathode, and create some electric field with anode -- electrons will be emitted, some of them will be captured by anode, the rest will escape the device, leaving it positively charged. As long as anode is positive relative to cathode, electron cannon will work. You can lose electrons until the point when you are so positively charged that all electrons that left the cannon have less energy that it is necessary to leave the spaceship.
Or you can make a source of positively or negatively charged ions -- they can be accelerated in a similar way. Again, this probably can be much easier achieved by messing with an ion engine, under/over compensating the positively charged ions that leave the engine.
WTF? Really, WTF?
Competitive sports at school == pointless drama, encouragement of intellectual deficiency, deterioration of social environment, and discouragement of healthy physical activity. Just look at the US schools.
...and to make it even more clear -- no, charges do not get evenly distributed along the surface. They repel each other to the end of the filaments, and ends of the filaments repel from each other, forming a sphere.
Corona in a gas is easy to produce because gas can be ionized by strong electric field along the spike or fiber, giving you a lot of charged particles to carry your discharge current. In vacuum you have nothing but those electrons that are already in metal -- you can emit them if you are negatively charged, and can't emit anything if you are positively charged (think of it as a giant diode tube). Even if you emit electrons, you have to move very fast so magnetic field will divert them away from you, and once you are sufficiently positively charged, emission will stop.
Most likely at best this will produce a cloud of electrons following a positively charged spaceship, so forces that magnetic field applies to both will almost completely compensate each other. With radioactive source of charged particles (positively or negatively charged), or electron cannon you can produce more charge on the spacecraft, and probably it can be combined with ion engine that produces charged particles anyway.
Equipotential surface does not need a conductor along it. Drill a hole in a metal sphere on a Van de Graaf generator, and it will make no difference except for immediate edges, the potential in the center of the hole will be approximately the same as it was when there was metal in it.
Where did those people study Physics? It doesn't work that way.
The only surface area that matters is an equipotential surface, so in the case of "filaments sticking in all directions" it will be a roughly spherical surface formed by the ends of filaments. Within this sphere there is almost no electric field -- filaments can be seen as a kind of lightning rods, except there is no lightning because they are in vacuum. So at best they will have a larger sphere, at worst a cigar or other shape with less surface area. If one has to build a large but light sphere, he can make it out of the wire mesh -- in vacuum it won't discharge like it would in the air, where those spheres have to be smooth. Filaments or spikes can be useful for acceleration of charged particles.
As for usefulness of the whole thing, I guess, you can use this for steering the spaceship, however the analogy to surfing is very poor. Surfboards can accelerate by absorbing the energy of waves moving from deep to shallow water. This thing flies through a stable magnetic field, steering by changing its electric charge. A better analogy would be a sailboat changing tacks, with gravity acting as a wind and magnetic field as water resistance.
...some Linux distros.
This only happens when frequency is set manually, and in recent X versions it is only necessary for some unusual, non-standard configurations -- same as with Windows (I have last time edited a modeline when connecting an old Sun monitor that didn't even have a VGA connector on its cable). Modern monitors usually display a giant floating "FREQUENCY OUT OF RANGE", "UNSUPPORTED VIDEO MODE" or similar message when this happens. Ctrl Alt + and Ctrl Alt - allow the user to cycle through resolutions, so he usually doesn't even lose graphics, he just sees a large scrolly desktop. However even if the user managed to replace the video card and keep the previously configured "unusual" monitor, it will just set the same mode (though the card may refuse to support it -- but then same would happen on Windows, user will have to reset to the minimal mode and go from there either way). Those things would be beyond the newbie's abilities to configure on any OS, so he would have to reset the configuration and settle for one of the default video modes.
I call bullshit.
1. In no possible situation a graphics card can go into a power-saving mode when you run a wrong driver. You need some ancient ISA graphics card to even make it possible for the wrong driver to TRY to access it -- otherwise PCI IDs won't match, and X will exit with failure.
2. If X server is running on any modern Linux distro, Ctrl-Alt-Backspace will merely restart it -- it's started from display manager. If X server failed multiple times, display manager gives you an error in text dialog box, and stops trying. You will see a text login prompt.
3. If X server does not fail, switch to console is Ctrl-Alt-F1.
4. You can always change display driver to "vesa" and use your graphics card in compatibility mode. As opposed to Windows it won't drop you into 640x480, either.
And since only a moron or Windows shill wouldn't know that, I recommend you to shut up.
Microsoft Office is the worst format for any kind of organized workflow -- it's designed for random ad-hoc editing, that can only be safely done within an organization. Even ODF is better for that purpose, though usually some other XML-based format is made specifically for those things.
If two guys are mining copper with no economy around them, they produce a worthless product. If there are more people involved, usually it's an economy where miners get royally screwed regardless of the amount of money they get.
http://www.blackfiveservices.co.uk/separate.shtml
Of course, most of "advanced Photoshop users" that still passionately demand CMYK support in Gimp never did anything that actually needed it (hint: printer drivers don't need it in the application).
I see, you have spent a lot of time trying to justify your positions by cherry-picked scenarios and generalization with no evidence. If this is all that such a resourceful person can present in a desperate attempt to support his point of view, I think, Open Source software is doing great.
It certainly did. Many computer-literate people, myself included, recommend others specifically WRT54G (or similar router) with DD-WRT or other third-party firmware, as opposed to routers that can only use its vendors' firmware. Linksys even sells a more expensive WRT54GL with more RAM and flash (like v1-v4) for people who use larger configurations.
If Linksys originally developed its current v5-v6 firmware, their product would be inferior, and users who wanted anything better than that would have to buy a much more expensive model. Even taking into account that Linksys is now owned by Cisco, one of the companies that produces "more expensive models", there would be a huge gap between their cheap and expensive wireless routers, so many users wouldn't buy either. Third-party firmware elevated the quality of cheap WRT54G to the level needed for more demanding applications (Bittorrent, games), complex NAT/forwarding/DMZ configurations, large networks, VPN, even some VoIP telephony. Lucky for Linksys/Cisco, this covered exactly the range where their other products weren't. Of course, being full of idiots, Linksys management refused to make the next logical step and sell WRT54G with third-party firmware preinstalled, however they still benefited from it.
This is baseless.
Developers never have to pay when they use closed code within the company, yet they are aware that they can't just stuff it into everything when the license prohibits it, may require unacceptable royalties, etc. If anything, developers are usually less aware of the details of commercial licenses because those licenses are usually completely unreadable, and managers don't explain to developers any details of potential royalties and other costs involved. On the other hand, BSD license is very short, and the text of GPL mostly consists of explanations why and how it is supposed to be used. Very difficult to miss any details.