The anti-war folks claim there was no possibility of WMD when in fact there was a very significant possibility.
No, they claim there was no proof, when Bush told the world he had proof and then failed to produce it or the weapons.
This combined with the fact that Iraq itself claimed to possess said weapons, had not cooperated with UN inspections,
They were actively claiming they had destroyed the weapons, and were cooperating with the UN inspectors, who themselves opposed the invasion, asking instead for more time to inspect.
AND had made public its support of terrorism against one of our allies (Israel) was, in my opinion, enough reason to overthrow Saddam.
Dispite the fact that it is illegal (under our laws) for us to do so? I don't think Saddam was a good person, and I can't say the majority of the world will miss him, but I do say that our principles ought to mean more to us than they seem to.
Incidentally, we had satellite surveillence and spies testimony.
The administration claims we did. That claim now seems questionable.
Whether or not that intelligence was accurate is still up for debate. If it was not, the intelligence community is to blame, not Bush.
Hardly. In general, they warned against the use of the faulty information (some of which was publicly known to be forged, etc.). The administation largely ignored their concerns. NASA anyone?
Instead, they can cut the GPLed code out of their product.
They could also come to some other agreement with the author(s) of whatever GPLed code they want to use. Nothing in the GPL prevents the authors of GPLed code from offering it under as many different sets of terms as they choose, including (presumably for a fee) inclusion in a closed source product.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. They could (under some circumstances) also clarify the boundary between their main product and the part that uses GPLed code so that they did meet the terms of the GPL.
The modern understanding of the word, among both lawyers and the general populace, is quite the opposite.
Not in my experience. Yours may be different. Although the perception among the general populace (as indicated by the dictionaries and my few rabid debate-friends here) seems to be that lawyers use it in the "modern" sense, my law dictionaries (from the 1990s) and my experience with laywers for the past thirty years leads my to believe that most laywers prefer the older meaning.
The fact that in my experience one group tends to use it one way and the second group tends to use it the other is what led me to my suposition. That is the only relevance it has to this thread. There are many reasonable ways you might dispute my suposition that the document was writen by someone trying to sound like a lawyer, but unless you have a time machine there is not much you can do to alter my experience that led to it.
But in the mid-19th century people also began to look at the hypothetical side of moot as its essential meaning, and they started to use the word to mean "of no significance or relevance." Thus, a moot point, however debatable, is one that has no practical value.
Note that, while the preceeding section gave the legal etymology, this refers to "people" in general. It does not say that this is the accepted sense in legal documents. Note also that they go on to state that this sense is not universally accepted.
Um. "moot" meant the opposite of "arguable." That is to say, a moot point is by definition inarguable.
Not to most lawyers.
The adjective moot is originally a legal term going back to the mid-16th century. It derives from the noun moot, in its sense of a hypothetical case argued as an exercise by law students. Consequently, a moot question is one that is arguable or open to debate.
You may not like it, but some words have several meanings. Use 1 or 2 dictionaries or usage guides before criticizing.
First of all, I was not "criticizing"; I was stating a doubt that had occurred to me, and giving some of the reasons.
Secondly, although words frequently have multiple meanings in generally usage, they typically are not used in the looser senses by practitioners for whom they are jargon with a specific meaning. I would be suspicious of a EE who used "volts" to describe current (e.g. "careful, there's a lot of volts flowing though this wire"), and I have never met an lawyer who would use moot in the sense used by SCO.
My copy of Blacks lists only the sense "arguable" for the term "moot"; the sense of previously settled you are quoting seems to be from "moot case" which is not at all the sense in which SCO used the term (there is a clear distinction between a point and a case in legal jargon).
In fact, not only is it in dictionaries in the meaning you disliked, but according to Garner's authoritative "Modern American Usage", the meaning "of no practictical importance" in American English, "is the predominant sense of 'moot'".
Many people drink "alot" of soda and many of them might say that this "infers" that they eat french fries too. I am not obligated to share in their taste for junk food any more than I am bound by their taste in language. Democracy has not yet reached the totalitarian level in such matters.
In any case, you seem to be missing my main point: I am not saying this way is right and that is wrong, I am saying that the language used in the SCO statement sounded to me more like a non-lawyer trying to sound like a lawyer than like an actual lawyer.
Nothing you have said argues against my suposition; if anything, much of what you said supports it.
They claimed it wasn't Microsoft. But they also list Microsoft among their top ten investors (#8) and Vulcan Ventures (Paul Allen, IIRC) as #1. It's on page three, the same page where they talk about confidentiality of the source of funds as among the advantages of their PIPEs.
And even if the 60% of the money that didn't come from Baystar came through RBC, that doesn't mean it didn't start out the day in Redmond.
Furthermore, they are not talking about techniques that you could use if the "attacker" had access to the source code. (See the full paper, linked to in a comment above.)
This would work about as well for open source software as adding easter eggs (which they also discuss). From my perspective, this is a fine paper but easter eggs are still a lot more fun to write.
I'm starting to wonder if they even have real lawyers involved. At least, their Friday babbling 1) misused "moot" to mean "no longer relevant" (instead of "arguable") and 2) used "gravaman" twice in place of "gravamen".
These may seem like obscure points, but what would you think of code samples that used "while/else" and pointers to chair?
I'm postulating a virus that is aware that it is running on WINE, which shouldn't be all that hard to figure out, even from VBScript. What's to stop such a virus on cxoffice today from escaping the fake_windows root and causing mischief among all my MP3^H^H^Himportant work files?
What's to stop Lex Luther from taking over your system and using it to defeat Superman? The fact that they are fictional and you are not. They don't really exist; everything they appear to do or say is really a contrived effect brough about by cleverly arranged bits of things that do exist.
The same is true of software. A virus can't scratch the paint on your car because you haven't given your computer a means to "reach out" and do things like that. The virus exists at a different level than your car.
Likewise, if the virus isn't running on your real computer but instead is running on a "virtual machine" that your real computer is simulating, it can only do things that you give it a means to do. If the "home directory" you show it is a sand box that contains nothing of interest, then it will have to live with that.
Detecting that you are running under wine only helps if there are exploitable holes in wine. Even if he realizes that he's fictional, Lex Luther won't be able to do anything he couldn't otherwise do.
Continuations are very useful in AI; often they are the only clean way of implementing a "hold that thought", which comes up very frequently in (for example) natural language processing. If you are trying to evaluate a sentence "as the words are coming in" by building a semantic structure that represents the meaning so far, you generally will want to be able to rearrange the semantic fragments based on later information. For example, if asked to name "the tallest person you know" vs. "the tallest person you know of who was president of the US" or "the tallest person you know could exist", etc. the search algorithm you build after the first words have been processed will be much less efficient than what you can morph it into after you know more.
Why would you want to do this instead of waiting till the whole sentence has been processed? Because it more closely models how people actually think. People don't wait for you to hit "send" before starting to figure out the meaning of what is being said.
Outlook is the only solution that will get you on board with the calendaring and other features besides email.
turn into
So you also get a big productivity boost as long as you use anything other than Outlook.
?
By the transform Joke(p,h) --> p'.
Specifically, in this case, the hidden snide implication h = "calendaring and other features besides email take up more time than they save, resulting in a net loss of productivity".
-- MarkusQ
P.S. On the real topic, the email plagues that Outlook propogates (excluding meeting requests) get their sting from macros, VB scripts, etc. that only run "on top of" the windows API. There aren't VB calls to talk to "directly" to linux, and I don't expect any will be added. Even EXE files that the user might be tricked into running would depend on wine (not linux) to launch them. That means that wine could do any sort of sandboxing / sanity checks upto and including running them (at reduced speed) on a simulated 80386 and faking all their attempts at IO to see what they do.
If the groupware platform is Exchange, and they don't support the web interface, and it's not Exchange 2000, Outlook is the only solution that will get you on board with the calendaring and other features besides email.
*smile* So you also get a big productivity boost as long as you use anything other than Outlook. Cool.
Like, for example, a virus could respond to your protective pop-up.
How, if it's in the outer context? If Odin stops mortal time to ask Loki if he should smite you or let you take the last fudge brownie, what in the heck are you going to do about it? I think you're missing the key advantage of a virtualization layer: you can in principle see everyting that the hosted code is doing, while it sees only what you choose to show it.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. For what it's worth, I think we are mostly in agreement; we're just reaching different conclusions because of slightly different starting assumptions.
How do you know these dark-nerds exist? I suppose we would be safe assuming the interact gravitationally. They might even absorb or reflect photons. But apart from using nmap to see what OS they run, checking their bookshelf for a CRC, etc., how are we to distinguish them from plain old shy people? Or maybe just people who (unlike us, apparently), mind their own business? What reason, apart from Hollywood and a lot of popular stereotypes, do we have to believe that this "typical" anti-social technically oriented person exists?
It would be good if more technically oriented people re-joined the world.
I don't think they've left really left. My wife and I regularly see a dozen so of her MIT grad school classmates; add a handfull of my old math-and-physics crowd and my work nerd friends and you have a good, handy sample of "technically oriented people".
They all seem to be involved in the world.
Most of them are married, and a lot of them have kids, and all of them seem to be great parents. We all seem to have good relations with our end parents, with a very few exceptions. The ones that want jobs have good ones. Quite a few of us are involved in volunteer work (scouts, coaching, etc.) There are a number of mountain bike-nuts, and several music people. A few wine snobs, a few linux nuts, a sky-diving addict, and what have you. Between us we speak or read more languages than most groups our size, and collectively we own more businesses and are more involved in our communities than a like-sized group of non-nerds (for that matter, more of us vote, even counting the non-US-citizens among us). We read more, we travel more, we work and play with people across the globe without caring where they live or what they look like. About the only thing we are sub-standard in is television-watching.
So, where is this "world" you speak of, that we should rejoin?
I wonder why I'm not thrilled at the prospect of patching buggy Windows software so it will run safely on Linux.
Like with anything, it's hard to judge the atractiveness of the idea without comparing it to the alternatives. Getting thrown to the lions with nothing but a sharp stick might not seem that great, but if your best alternative is going in without the stick...
In my experience, the most common application running under cxoffice is Outlook...
In mine it's mostly useful for odd legecy stuff that is core to the business but has no analogue on *nix yet. Stuff that was either developed in-house but hasn't been ported (why port when we aren't using *nix? / we can't start using *nix, it won't run our software) or developed outside by companies that have no intention of porting it--perhaps because they are defunct.
[Outlook] is sort of CodeWeaver's "killer app."
Eh. Evolution is pretty much there for most users, IMHO. And there are lots of other options. A great number of people don't need or want a ball of bloatware to send read their e-mail.
As others have noted, running as non-root doesn't protect you from a virus that is aware of WINE, and takes advantage of the network connectivity of your box to propogate itself, or worse...And I don't know about you, but the most important files on my laptop aren't owned by root, they're owned by me. Also, consider this: cracking a box from the network is generally more difficult than rooting it once you are local. WINE running Outlook or IE would seem to be an attractive target, but for the fact that it is still not widespread enough to attract much attention.
Agreed on all points.
I notice that there is this cute "Y" drive under cxoffice that is a window (heh) on to your ~/. Now a WINE aware virus has some local fies to play with that aren't part of the API compatibility layer. Do you have a ~/bin? Seems like a good place to slip in a trojan.
And here is where I see the advantage of emulators. I could remove this, move it, protect it with a pop-up verification, honey-pot it, or do whatever else I wanted. If the problems start, somebody--maybe me, maybe you, maybe both of us, but probably lots of people will come up with different ways to foul up the bad guys. We can learn from each other but aren't commited to being a monoculture-except-for-failure-to-apply-patches that we would be with a propretary "solution".
The combination of open source with an added layer of abstraction is a powerful tool for the good guys.
The big advantage to something like wine (or to a lesser extent, dosemu, mars, etc.) is that you can insert shims at pretty much any level to catch / filter / stop / watch this sort of thing. I find it amazingly useful to be able to instrument & monitor pretty much any level I want (with the usual cavets about making sure you don't break things by inapropriate logging, etc.). It shouldn't be too hard to put a rubber-room/internal firewall around whatever infection prone software you felt like running, and stopping these things dead in their tracks. (e.g., by default, cap the rate at which network trafic can flow out of applications running under wine, lower the boom if they try to send out too much e-mail too quickly, etc).
Being blindly dismissive is one attribute of Linux zealots that turns many people - people who would otherwise be interested in learning more about Linux - off.
This is a very strange use of the term "zealot." In most non-warped contexts, a zealot is someone who passionately cares about some topic, and generally insists that others share their view. To call someone a zealot specifically because they are dismissivly indifferent to what other people think or do is odd enough, but the capping irony is warning them off of their attitude because it might "turn people off".
I think there is a deep and prevelent misunderstanding of what was once a very common attitude, summed up in phrases like "to each his own" and "live and let live"--so many people today can't seem to grasp the idea that people might say something blindly dismissive, not as a marketing ploy for some product or a public relations posture for some company, but as an honest statement of an individual who isn't trying to sell anything.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. I can just hear all the people asking themselves "What an odd comment to make; I wonder what his angle is?"
I know the Libertarian ideal is very unpopular just by reading this very thread
The Libertarians lost me when they got their ideals tangled and fell for the myth "intellectual property". What could be more victimless (or more natural) than one smart-monkey watching what another smarter-monkey does and copying it? That's almost a definition of the human condition from cradle to grave, yet somehow the Libertarians decided that it was OK for the first marginaly-smarter-or-at-least-luck monkey to stop (by force even!) the other monkeys from learning by watching. That, I think, is where they lost a lot of us.
Actually, quite the opposite. By staying private they lose the ability to keep the talent on board by issuing those high-valued employees stock in the company.
That's the kind of thinking that killed the tech boom. The way to keep employees is to pay them what they are worth, treat them well, and be honest with them. You may lose the ones that would rather by treated badly and lied to, but you are actually better off without them.
On the original point, you may also lose the potential for unrestrained growth, but (IMHO) this is also a good thing. I tend towards the medical view of that kind of unplaned exponential growth.
Until the government...starts looking for terrorist instead of weapons...
What difference would that make? Apparently a college sophmore with no terrorist training (apart, I suppose, from what you pick up naturally by being a college freshman) was able to smuggle exactly the sort of items they are looking for through "security" not once, but several times.
So what does it matter what they look for, if they aren't able to find it?
I'm am like so totally sure that was a coincidence, right-o.
Congradulations. In my experience, non-mathematicians who try to argue with statistics generally invest a great deal of effort clothing their flawed arguments in something that looks vaguely like math, only to hurt their own arguments more than they hurt their opponent's.
You have somehow managed to get most of the negative effects of faulty statistical reasoning without having to bother with all the psuedo-math stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
You're rewritting history:
-
The anti-war folks claim there was no possibility of WMD when in fact there was a very significant possibility.
- This combined with the fact that Iraq itself claimed to possess said weapons, had not cooperated with UN inspections,
-
AND had made public its support of terrorism against one of our allies (Israel) was, in my opinion, enough reason to overthrow Saddam.
- Incidentally, we had satellite surveillence and spies testimony.
- Whether or not that intelligence was accurate is still up for debate. If it was not, the intelligence community is to blame, not Bush.
-- MarkusQNo, they claim there was no proof, when Bush told the world he had proof and then failed to produce it or the weapons.
They were actively claiming they had destroyed the weapons, and were cooperating with the UN inspectors, who themselves opposed the invasion, asking instead for more time to inspect.
Dispite the fact that it is illegal (under our laws) for us to do so? I don't think Saddam was a good person, and I can't say the majority of the world will miss him, but I do say that our principles ought to mean more to us than they seem to.
The administration claims we did. That claim now seems questionable.
Hardly. In general, they warned against the use of the faulty information (some of which was publicly known to be forged, etc.). The administation largely ignored their concerns. NASA anyone?
However, there's no mention of a fix yet.
And when there is a fix it will only be available to users who have properly registered and activated their copy of the program.
-- MarkusQ
Instead, they can cut the GPLed code out of their product.
They could also come to some other agreement with the author(s) of whatever GPLed code they want to use. Nothing in the GPL prevents the authors of GPLed code from offering it under as many different sets of terms as they choose, including (presumably for a fee) inclusion in a closed source product.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. They could (under some circumstances) also clarify the boundary between their main product and the part that uses GPLed code so that they did meet the terms of the GPL.
Irrespective of whether or not moot means "arguable," "supposition" has two P's.
Thanks. I'll try to remember that.
-- MarkusQ
The modern understanding of the word, among both lawyers and the general populace, is quite the opposite.
Not in my experience. Yours may be different. Although the perception among the general populace (as indicated by the dictionaries and my few rabid debate-friends here) seems to be that lawyers use it in the "modern" sense, my law dictionaries (from the 1990s) and my experience with laywers for the past thirty years leads my to believe that most laywers prefer the older meaning.
The fact that in my experience one group tends to use it one way and the second group tends to use it the other is what led me to my suposition. That is the only relevance it has to this thread. There are many reasonable ways you might dispute my suposition that the document was writen by someone trying to sound like a lawyer, but unless you have a time machine there is not much you can do to alter my experience that led to it.
-- MarkusQ
I believe the passage you are citing is:
Note that, while the preceeding section gave the legal etymology, this refers to "people" in general. It does not say that this is the accepted sense in legal documents. Note also that they go on to state that this sense is not universally accepted.
-- MarkusQ
Um. "moot" meant the opposite of "arguable." That is to say, a moot point is by definition inarguable.
Not to most lawyers.
-- MarkusQYou may not like it, but some words have several meanings. Use 1 or 2 dictionaries or usage guides before criticizing.
First of all, I was not "criticizing"; I was stating a doubt that had occurred to me, and giving some of the reasons.
Secondly, although words frequently have multiple meanings in generally usage, they typically are not used in the looser senses by practitioners for whom they are jargon with a specific meaning. I would be suspicious of a EE who used "volts" to describe current (e.g. "careful, there's a lot of volts flowing though this wire"), and I have never met an lawyer who would use moot in the sense used by SCO.
My copy of Blacks lists only the sense "arguable" for the term "moot"; the sense of previously settled you are quoting seems to be from "moot case" which is not at all the sense in which SCO used the term (there is a clear distinction between a point and a case in legal jargon).
In fact, not only is it in dictionaries in the meaning you disliked, but according to Garner's authoritative "Modern American Usage", the meaning "of no practictical importance" in American English, "is the predominant sense of 'moot'".
Many people drink "alot" of soda and many of them might say that this "infers" that they eat french fries too. I am not obligated to share in their taste for junk food any more than I am bound by their taste in language. Democracy has not yet reached the totalitarian level in such matters.
In any case, you seem to be missing my main point: I am not saying this way is right and that is wrong, I am saying that the language used in the SCO statement sounded to me more like a non-lawyer trying to sound like a lawyer than like an actual lawyer.
Nothing you have said argues against my suposition; if anything, much of what you said supports it.
-- MarkusQ
They claimed it wasn't Microsoft. But they also list Microsoft among their top ten investors (#8) and Vulcan Ventures (Paul Allen, IIRC) as #1. It's on page three, the same page where they talk about confidentiality of the source of funds as among the advantages of their PIPEs.
And even if the 60% of the money that didn't come from Baystar came through RBC, that doesn't mean it didn't start out the day in Redmond.
-- MarkusQ
Furthermore, they are not talking about techniques that you could use if the "attacker" had access to the source code. (See the full paper, linked to in a comment above.)
This would work about as well for open source software as adding easter eggs (which they also discuss). From my perspective, this is a fine paper but easter eggs are still a lot more fun to write.
-- MarkusQ
I'm starting to wonder if they even have real lawyers involved. At least, their Friday babbling 1) misused "moot" to mean "no longer relevant" (instead of "arguable") and 2) used "gravaman" twice in place of "gravamen".
These may seem like obscure points, but what would you think of code samples that used "while/else" and pointers to chair?
-- MarkusQ
I'm postulating a virus that is aware that it is running on WINE, which shouldn't be all that hard to figure out, even from VBScript. What's to stop such a virus on cxoffice today from escaping the fake_windows root and causing mischief among all my MP3^H^H^Himportant work files?
What's to stop Lex Luther from taking over your system and using it to defeat Superman? The fact that they are fictional and you are not. They don't really exist; everything they appear to do or say is really a contrived effect brough about by cleverly arranged bits of things that do exist.
The same is true of software. A virus can't scratch the paint on your car because you haven't given your computer a means to "reach out" and do things like that. The virus exists at a different level than your car.
Likewise, if the virus isn't running on your real computer but instead is running on a "virtual machine" that your real computer is simulating, it can only do things that you give it a means to do. If the "home directory" you show it is a sand box that contains nothing of interest, then it will have to live with that.
Detecting that you are running under wine only helps if there are exploitable holes in wine. Even if he realizes that he's fictional, Lex Luther won't be able to do anything he couldn't otherwise do.
-- MarkusQ
Continuations are very useful in AI; often they are the only clean way of implementing a "hold that thought", which comes up very frequently in (for example) natural language processing. If you are trying to evaluate a sentence "as the words are coming in" by building a semantic structure that represents the meaning so far, you generally will want to be able to rearrange the semantic fragments based on later information. For example, if asked to name "the tallest person you know" vs. "the tallest person you know of who was president of the US" or "the tallest person you know could exist", etc. the search algorithm you build after the first words have been processed will be much less efficient than what you can morph it into after you know more.
Why would you want to do this instead of waiting till the whole sentence has been processed? Because it more closely models how people actually think. People don't wait for you to hit "send" before starting to figure out the meaning of what is being said.
-- MarkusQ
By the transform Joke(p,h) --> p'
Specifically, in this case, the hidden snide implication h = "calendaring and other features besides email take up more time than they save, resulting in a net loss of productivity".
-- MarkusQ
P.S. On the real topic, the email plagues that Outlook propogates (excluding meeting requests) get their sting from macros, VB scripts, etc. that only run "on top of" the windows API. There aren't VB calls to talk to "directly" to linux, and I don't expect any will be added. Even EXE files that the user might be tricked into running would depend on wine (not linux) to launch them. That means that wine could do any sort of sandboxing / sanity checks upto and including running them (at reduced speed) on a simulated 80386 and faking all their attempts at IO to see what they do.
If the groupware platform is Exchange, and they don't support the web interface, and it's not Exchange 2000, Outlook is the only solution that will get you on board with the calendaring and other features besides email.
*smile* So you also get a big productivity boost as long as you use anything other than Outlook. Cool.
Like, for example, a virus could respond to your protective pop-up.
How, if it's in the outer context? If Odin stops mortal time to ask Loki if he should smite you or let you take the last fudge brownie, what in the heck are you going to do about it? I think you're missing the key advantage of a virtualization layer: you can in principle see everyting that the hosted code is doing, while it sees only what you choose to show it.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. For what it's worth, I think we are mostly in agreement; we're just reaching different conclusions because of slightly different starting assumptions.
*laugh* Talk about a nearly-irrefutable position.
How do you know these dark-nerds exist? I suppose we would be safe assuming the interact gravitationally. They might even absorb or reflect photons. But apart from using nmap to see what OS they run, checking their bookshelf for a CRC, etc., how are we to distinguish them from plain old shy people? Or maybe just people who (unlike us, apparently), mind their own business? What reason, apart from Hollywood and a lot of popular stereotypes, do we have to believe that this "typical" anti-social technically oriented person exists?
-- MarkusQ
It would be good if more technically oriented people re-joined the world.
I don't think they've left really left. My wife and I regularly see a dozen so of her MIT grad school classmates; add a handfull of my old math-and-physics crowd and my work nerd friends and you have a good, handy sample of "technically oriented people".
They all seem to be involved in the world.
Most of them are married, and a lot of them have kids, and all of them seem to be great parents. We all seem to have good relations with our end parents, with a very few exceptions. The ones that want jobs have good ones. Quite a few of us are involved in volunteer work (scouts, coaching, etc.) There are a number of mountain bike-nuts, and several music people. A few wine snobs, a few linux nuts, a sky-diving addict, and what have you. Between us we speak or read more languages than most groups our size, and collectively we own more businesses and are more involved in our communities than a like-sized group of non-nerds (for that matter, more of us vote, even counting the non-US-citizens among us). We read more, we travel more, we work and play with people across the globe without caring where they live or what they look like. About the only thing we are sub-standard in is television-watching.
So, where is this "world" you speak of, that we should rejoin?
-- MarkusQ
I wonder why I'm not thrilled at the prospect of patching buggy Windows software so it will run safely on Linux.
Like with anything, it's hard to judge the atractiveness of the idea without comparing it to the alternatives. Getting thrown to the lions with nothing but a sharp stick might not seem that great, but if your best alternative is going in without the stick...
In my experience, the most common application running under cxoffice is Outlook...
In mine it's mostly useful for odd legecy stuff that is core to the business but has no analogue on *nix yet. Stuff that was either developed in-house but hasn't been ported (why port when we aren't using *nix? / we can't start using *nix, it won't run our software) or developed outside by companies that have no intention of porting it--perhaps because they are defunct.
[Outlook] is sort of CodeWeaver's "killer app."
Eh. Evolution is pretty much there for most users, IMHO. And there are lots of other options. A great number of people don't need or want a ball of bloatware to send read their e-mail.
As others have noted, running as non-root doesn't protect you from a virus that is aware of WINE, and takes advantage of the network connectivity of your box to propogate itself, or worse...And I don't know about you, but the most important files on my laptop aren't owned by root, they're owned by me. Also, consider this: cracking a box from the network is generally more difficult than rooting it once you are local. WINE running Outlook or IE would seem to be an attractive target, but for the fact that it is still not widespread enough to attract much attention.
Agreed on all points.
I notice that there is this cute "Y" drive under cxoffice that is a window (heh) on to your ~/. Now a WINE aware virus has some local fies to play with that aren't part of the API compatibility layer. Do you have a ~/bin? Seems like a good place to slip in a trojan.
And here is where I see the advantage of emulators. I could remove this, move it, protect it with a pop-up verification, honey-pot it, or do whatever else I wanted. If the problems start, somebody--maybe me, maybe you, maybe both of us, but probably lots of people will come up with different ways to foul up the bad guys. We can learn from each other but aren't commited to being a monoculture-except-for-failure-to-apply-patches that we would be with a propretary "solution".
The combination of open source with an added layer of abstraction is a powerful tool for the good guys.
-- MarkusQ
The big advantage to something like wine (or to a lesser extent, dosemu, mars, etc.) is that you can insert shims at pretty much any level to catch / filter / stop / watch this sort of thing. I find it amazingly useful to be able to instrument & monitor pretty much any level I want (with the usual cavets about making sure you don't break things by inapropriate logging, etc.). It shouldn't be too hard to put a rubber-room/internal firewall around whatever infection prone software you felt like running, and stopping these things dead in their tracks. (e.g., by default, cap the rate at which network trafic can flow out of applications running under wine, lower the boom if they try to send out too much e-mail too quickly, etc).
-- MarkusQ
Being blindly dismissive is one attribute of Linux zealots that turns many people - people who would otherwise be interested in learning more about Linux - off.
This is a very strange use of the term "zealot." In most non-warped contexts, a zealot is someone who passionately cares about some topic, and generally insists that others share their view. To call someone a zealot specifically because they are dismissivly indifferent to what other people think or do is odd enough, but the capping irony is warning them off of their attitude because it might "turn people off".
I think there is a deep and prevelent misunderstanding of what was once a very common attitude, summed up in phrases like "to each his own" and "live and let live"--so many people today can't seem to grasp the idea that people might say something blindly dismissive, not as a marketing ploy for some product or a public relations posture for some company, but as an honest statement of an individual who isn't trying to sell anything.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. I can just hear all the people asking themselves "What an odd comment to make; I wonder what his angle is?"
I know the Libertarian ideal is very unpopular just by reading this very thread
The Libertarians lost me when they got their ideals tangled and fell for the myth "intellectual property". What could be more victimless (or more natural) than one smart-monkey watching what another smarter-monkey does and copying it? That's almost a definition of the human condition from cradle to grave, yet somehow the Libertarians decided that it was OK for the first marginaly-smarter-or-at-least-luck monkey to stop (by force even!) the other monkeys from learning by watching. That, I think, is where they lost a lot of us.
-- MarkusQ
Actually, quite the opposite. By staying private they lose the ability to keep the talent on board by issuing those high-valued employees stock in the company.
That's the kind of thinking that killed the tech boom. The way to keep employees is to pay them what they are worth, treat them well, and be honest with them. You may lose the ones that would rather by treated badly and lied to, but you are actually better off without them.
On the original point, you may also lose the potential for unrestrained growth, but (IMHO) this is also a good thing. I tend towards the medical view of that kind of unplaned exponential growth.
-- MarkusQ
Until the government...starts looking for terrorist instead of weapons...
What difference would that make? Apparently a college sophmore with no terrorist training (apart, I suppose, from what you pick up naturally by being a college freshman) was able to smuggle exactly the sort of items they are looking for through "security" not once, but several times.
So what does it matter what they look for, if they aren't able to find it?
-- MarkusQ
I'm am like so totally sure that was a coincidence, right-o.
Congradulations. In my experience, non-mathematicians who try to argue with statistics generally invest a great deal of effort clothing their flawed arguments in something that looks vaguely like math, only to hurt their own arguments more than they hurt their opponent's.
You have somehow managed to get most of the negative effects of faulty statistical reasoning without having to bother with all the psuedo-math stuff.
Impressive.
-- MarkusQ
What do you hope to acomplish by doing this? Stereovision?
Does it have to be real time?
In short, why?
-- MarkusQ