Since when was "equal protection" a law of physics. This isn't conservation of energy we're talking about here. Laws are always, have always, and will always be selectively enforced based on the political agendas of those with the power to enforce them.
Felton is a professor at one of the most distinguished universities in the country. Skylarov is a "Russian hacker". Which do you think would be arrested 9 out of 10 times? It's disgusting. It shows the true colors of the society once again. Everything in our powre should be done to see that something's done to change it and get Dimitri back to his family as soon as possible. However, it's not surprising in the least that the distinction was made. "Equal protection" also doesn't necessarly apply to non-citizens, which leaves Dimitri out in the cold.
This whole situation ought to be a lesson to security researchers outside the US. The US government as it stands will arrest you because they don't like you. I'd recommend you don't attend any conventions or other meetings in the US, because if you've done anything close to what Dimitri did, you run the serious and real risk of being arrested until we natives can find some way to get the law changed to something sane.
A very large portion of the/. community is big into Linux but runs Windows some because it's got the games. Anything that might allow us to run less Windows yet still get the games we want is a Good Thing(tm) and you'd better believe it's gonna get posted.
Linux users are a seriously untapped segment of the gaming market, as Mac users used to be. Loki is filling an important niche and should be hailed (and supported monetarily) for it.
You can't because you are a paid basher talking out of your ass.
Oh gods, someone PLEASE tell me how I could get a job bashing Microsoft. I do it for free all the time.
And here's a security hole for you. Service Pack 6 (that's the original Service Pack 6, not 6a) not allowing anyone but Administrators to access the TCP/IP stack. You think that possibly some of Microsoft's vaunted legions of crack QA people might've possibly tried testing the service pack as something other than an Administrator?
I've been thinking about this as a possible "solution".
A wireless "Internet". Now, at least with current tech, you wouldn't be able to get globe-spanning Internet without a few "shadow" Internet connections. But a over-the-air shadow Internet with 802.11b or those peer-to-peer 128k Ricochet modems, or some other such wireless technology. Wouldn't necessarily be fast or especially reliable, but with it's growing populatiry it could at least be a functional replacement.
Now, the medium wouldn't be encrypted, but any normal IPSec or the like encryption could take place over it. You'd have to have a relatively dense concentration of people depending on the technology used, but with multiple discreet hookups to the land-line Internet you could serve patches of a city, and it's access to the world wouldn't be completely cut off if one connection was brought down.
I've been toying with the idea, and I realize there are some serious limitations wrt range and reliability, but it could be a start. Wouldn't be anonymous, but it's not like AOL could shut off my access to it. COngress isn't especially likely to pass a law outlawing wireless networking equipment, seeing as many wireless companies contribute generous sums to political parties.
Re:Well...at least RR is trying to help...
on
Code Red III
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· Score: 1
Now...how are they supposed to get the patches, tho...?
They've had a month to get the patch. If they haven't by now, whenever they get back from Pluto, they can use a friend's cable modem or a POTS modem and get the relatively small patch. I'm finding it hard to generate any sympathy for people still infectd by this virus.
Re:Copycats
on
Code Red III
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Whaddaya mean it's dead? If the traffic light on my cable modem is any indication, it's still alive and kicking. Maybe it ain't "cool" anymore but it's still out there and making a mess of things.
The only thing that's going to "let it die" is if the stupidity/incompetence that this virus so neatly reveals is cured and people patch their fucking servers. Until then, there's plenty to talk about. Hell, there's more to talk about. It's getting close to a month that systems have been getting hit by this virus and people are still being infected when an easy solution has been available for over two months. What planet are these people on?
"Aiport" isn't a standard. It wasn't even developed by Apple. They license the technology in Airport from Compaq. Oh, how droll. Ha ha. 'Tis to laugh. If you're gonna make a joke, at least make it funny.
Actually, Applied Cryptography is beneath my pillow lately.
PPTP? Don't make me laugh. At least cleartext doesn't insult the intelligence of a would-be attacker.
Across-the-Internet connections were and are IPSec encrypted. However, when I pull down confidential documents onto a "home wireless LAN" there's more than a little likelyhood that anyone who is either sniffing my wireless LAN will see it as I quickly pull it from my main box to my latop while I'm on the can or outside lounging or watching TV and doing work. Preventative security isn't just about putting encryption everywhere. Realizing and minimizing the risk inherent in the fact that your employees are human beings and don't follow all the rules to the letter is just as important.
And if you bother to try and make every single connection that occurs inside your home wireless LAN IPSec 3DES encrypted, how the hell do you ever get anything done?
The company I used to work for makes 802.11 hardware. A couple-three months ago they sent out an e-mail saying that every 802.11 wireless network demployed in the company, including home-LANs that people use to access remotely were to be taken offline indefinitely.
That pretty much convinced me it was junk. I'll stick to copper for anything I particularly care about, thanks.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought gravity isn't a particle or wave, but a property of space-time. The image being like taking a bowling ball and putting on a trampoline. The trampoline bends around the mass causing things sitting nearer the mass to slide down toward it.
I'm on Road Runner (AOL/TW) in SA, TX and the traffic light on my cable modem has been blinking nonstop since Saturday night. Thankfully, the first thing I did when I got connected was to get a personal firewall installed. Whenever I'm in Windows the log gets absolutely flooded. In Linux, I don't run any servers save sshd and have a simple "drop everything trying to talk at me" blanket firewall, but it's really degrading performance. Not all the time, but every so often everything slows to a crawl and/or stops altogether.
Just think what'll happen when someone evolves this thing to use an exploit where there is no patch available. Or more than one exploit. Or a cross-platform virus.
Re:BIG NEWS:
on
Code Redux
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· Score: 2, Insightful
We won't see something that destroys hardware last too long, because destroying hardware doesn't promote the expansion of the virus. Something that slows you down but doesn't kill you outright is far more likely to stick around long enough to get spread. Code Red, Code Red 2, and other "worms" are far more virus-like than most "viruses". Melissa, SirCam, and the like are merely trojans. They require users to interact with them. Code Red, Code Red 2, and the original Internet Worm replicate of their own volition and go out and find other infectable systems so they can repeat the process. Sounds a lot more like a biological virus to me.
How much more compact? "Yes" doesn't amount to a whole lot. What percentage here? Song X encoded with.mp3 at such and such sampling rate and such and so encoded bitrate is this big. The same song with the same sampling rate and bitrate as an.ogg file gives me a file that's this much smaller than the.mp3 file.
These kinds of statistics convince people. The attitude of "This is just better because it does all this crazy stuff and they're really nice guys and you just really should stop using those nasty mp3s because the format was made by mean people that we don't like anymore," isn't going to get you anywhere. Regular people are going to say "I'm from Missouri, show me" and demand proof before they throw away their incompatiple mp3 players or pay more money for a new player that supports.ogg files. I demand proof before I stop using mp3 and put through the time and effort needed to get people who I might send a file to to stop using mp3.
And you know what the hell of it is? MP3 was the darling of the pseudo-underground music trading scene that most of the people posting against it now were part of. The record companies, the sworn enemies of many posting here, would give anything if they could get put the mp3 genie back in the bottle. And you can STILL ENCODE HIGH QUALITY MP3S FOR FREE. And the fair weather friends after all that crap, and the insane success they helped make, tell it to go screw itself and go over to someone else's house because mp3's parents turned out to be jerks. I'm glad I didn't grow up with any of you.
This is the question that people are going to ask. Yes,.ogg isn't burdened by patent. Yes, anecdotal evidence suggests that it has better sound quality (I haven't actually ever heard a.ogg file played...nor has my composer SO, nor anyone I know personally for that matter...all I hear is that people claim it's neat). None of those features necessarily matter to anyone. Look at the VHS/Betamax deal. Betamax had better quality but VHS hit the big time.
Is.ogg a more compact method? Can I fit more of my collection onto CDROM in.ogg than.mp3 at equal sound quality? Patented algorithm or not, I can still get my hands on an.mp3 encoder for free. The patent holder can scream and bitch all they want, but until they somehow come up with the ability to effectively limit my access to.mp3 encoding software, I don't see that as much of a downside. They're sure as hell not getting any money from me. My friends and anyone I'd send a piece of audio to is far more likely to have a.mp3 capable device or software player.
VHS let you do more with less. Quality be damned. I've got a couple South Park episodes in.rm format and while the quality isn't great it get the point across and is enjoyable to watch. Why should I bother with a DVD that has better quality picture and sound when I've got something usable and can concievable fit an entire season's worth of shows on a CD instead of 4 episodes? If.ogg can't do it smaller, then what exactly can it do that would make me and anyone else use it? What's it's pitch?
Though admittedly it's coming along a lot faster than most. What we have here boys and girls are our own little hacker nanites. How long before a version of this comes out exploiting a security flaw where there is no patch for it? How long until a version comes out that tries more than one vulnerability?
As a certain commercial operating system gets more an more bloated, larger and larger files are less noticed. How long before a 1-2MB virus with a couple dozen attack types built in starts making the rounds?
I simply wish I lived in a world full of thinkers and leaders, not a world full of ignorant followers.
A wonderful, idealistic vision. Only problem is that it's purely idealistic. Ever hear the phrase "too many chiefs, not enough indians"? Everyone cannot lead. By definition, if you want to be a lead, you've got to have followers. If no one had followers, nothing would get done. Anyone with a great idea wouldn't have anyone to help implement it with. No decisions would ever get made because everyone would be second guessing everyone else.
A call for less ignorant followers I can agree with, but a world with just leaders is a world where nothing of consequence gets done. Followers are more important than leaders. The followers need to choose their leaders with more care.
I've been using Mozilla as my primary browser in Windows and Linux for a good few months now. There are only a few sites (that I bother to visit regularly) that can't handle Mozilla and that I need to run IE for.
And hell, thanks to a screwup on my part, I'd been running 0.8.1 for the last month or so on Linux and hadn't noticed any significant difference. Great job guys!
This would mean that no one could ever release software that was developed specifically for Linux under any license but the GPL, as Linux is GPLed and your software requires Linux to run, hence you are forced to release your software under the GPL.
Is glibc GPL or public domain? I don't know for sure, but if it is, and you link anything to the glibc sources, you must release that as GPL. Ad infinitum, IIRC.
This may be the correct interpretation of the GPL, and if so, you're going to see a huge dropoff in Linux support. FreeBSD here we come.
Re:Possible encryption and/or compression
on
Share The Pi!
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· Score: 1
A more likely use of pi for encryption purposes is as a source for a one-time pad encryption scheme. As opposed to generating all kinds of long complicated strings, you generate random lengths and offsets, or just the offsets with a set length would be sufficient. Boom. Unbreakable encryption, as long as you never repeat the same length/offset combination, and with an infinite amount of digits to work with, you'll never need to.
Also, this could be of use in generating keys for other encryption schemes.
Trash dumps will become prime real estate again as a source of unused and unwanted raw materials. Want to get rid of nuclear weapons? Blanket your enemy's missile bases with nanomachines that melt the fissable material/destroy the firing mechanism/turn the whole missile to goo. Toxic waste cleanup (aside from nuclear waste, as the stuff will still be radioactive broken down) would be a breeze. Just neatly break apart all those nasty molecules into friendly elements. Nanomachines that scrub CO2 from the atmosphere. Rebuild the ozone layer (this would be harder, but I imagine still possible).
Well, not really, but big shiny evil looking denial of service attacks are far more headline grabbing than grabbing a random personal file and sending that out. For most of America (and myself) the chances of something actually damaging getting sent out via SirCam is slim to nil. Possibly embarassing? Yeah, but embarassment isn't an ability that most Americans have.
The people that need to care about SirCam are the guvmint and big corporate honchos and they don't consume the majority of news...
This gets into some tricky legal issues. As far as I know, if your company provides encryption software to you, then you are legally obligated to give them your key(s). If they allow you to use encryption software but don't provide it, then they can't legally require you to give them your keys. IANAL of course, and and there's probably a far more accurate way of describing this, but that's how it's been explained to me.
The problem with that is that most people have better things to do with their lives than mess around with OSes. Someone who is a big shot lawyer has a few more important things to worry about than figuring out how to use this or that operating systems because it's "better". People want results from their computers, and they don't have the time to learn complitacted systems. They want the easiest one, because they're forced to use computers (at least in the business world). They hear all this jazzy stuff about the Internet and they want to be part of it and see all this stuff that WE are marketing to them. We of course conveniently forget to mention that you have to spend a serious amount of your already rapidly decreasing free time learning stuff "if you want to get the full power out of it". Most people are going to tell you to screw, and go for AOL which gets them an expeciance that they are happy with, without spending god knows how many hours it took us to learn it. Adults aren't kids anymore. We have work and other responsibilites that we didn't have when we and kids today have. We had gobs of relatively unstructured time where we could poke around and make mistakes and the like. If you really don't believe that people who don't want to take the time to learn about computers shouldn't buy them, then I suggest you find work in another field because the only reason most of us techies have our jobs is because those lazy people want computers that they are easily able to make all the neat stuff we talk to them about work. If your way isn't easy, they'll just find one that is. Make computers too hard? People will go back to pen-and-paper and typewriters faster than you can blink. It's a whole lot easier to pick up a pen and write a letter than wrestling with a "powerful" but hideously complex system in order to get it working to the level where you can send an e-mail to someone.
I don't believe customizing computers will ever really go away, though I do believe that it will become much less popular. The vast majority of people who own computers don't want to get anywhere near opening their cases. They don't want to worry about video card compatibility, they just want to be able to play _all_ of the neat games they see their friends playing, or whatever office package they like, or whatever personal finance package their friend recommended them.
Hence the attraction of the various console gaming systems. No worries about whether the testers thought your video card was worth the extra time working out the few major problems it causes. No worrying about whether you need A3D or EAX to get good sound out of it. No worrying whether the minimum system requirements on the back of the box mean "minimum for a decent playing experience" or "minimum to get the splash screen to come up and lock up the computer". When you buy a game for your Playstation 2, you have 100% certainty (barring flaws in the manufacturing process and COMPLETELY incompetent coders) that the game will load and run on your machine. Yeah, some peripherals are required, but they're shown prominently on the back with simple icons so even the dim have a chance of understanding it. Most of the people I know have conniptions trying to deciper the requirements on PC software. Even some of the computer literate people have issues.
The main problem, as with almost everything in the tech industry, is developing a standard, and having enough people sign on to that standard to make it viable. In the Linux world that isn't too much of an issue, as Linux can run on just about everything. Make a standard, Linux will 9 out of 10 times be able to work on it, and the 10th time will just take a bit of hacking by someone to fix. The greater Windows-based world (and I mean greater as in larger, not better) doesn't have that luxury. It'd turn the greater world of software into something much like the game industry is. You'd have Office for Compaq, Office for Dell, Office for Gateway, etc. Mac people aready deal with this kind of situation.
Slashdot Mirror
Felton is a professor at one of the most distinguished universities in the country. Skylarov is a "Russian hacker". Which do you think would be arrested 9 out of 10 times? It's disgusting. It shows the true colors of the society once again. Everything in our powre should be done to see that something's done to change it and get Dimitri back to his family as soon as possible. However, it's not surprising in the least that the distinction was made. "Equal protection" also doesn't necessarly apply to non-citizens, which leaves Dimitri out in the cold.
This whole situation ought to be a lesson to security researchers outside the US. The US government as it stands will arrest you because they don't like you. I'd recommend you don't attend any conventions or other meetings in the US, because if you've done anything close to what Dimitri did, you run the serious and real risk of being arrested until we natives can find some way to get the law changed to something sane.
A very large portion of the /. community is big into Linux but runs Windows some because it's got the games. Anything that might allow us to run less Windows yet still get the games we want is a Good Thing(tm) and you'd better believe it's gonna get posted.
Linux users are a seriously untapped segment of the gaming market, as Mac users used to be. Loki is filling an important niche and should be hailed (and supported monetarily) for it.
Oh gods, someone PLEASE tell me how I could get a job bashing Microsoft. I do it for free all the time.
And here's a security hole for you. Service Pack 6 (that's the original Service Pack 6, not 6a) not allowing anyone but Administrators to access the TCP/IP stack. You think that possibly some of Microsoft's vaunted legions of crack QA people might've possibly tried testing the service pack as something other than an Administrator?
Now, the medium wouldn't be encrypted, but any normal IPSec or the like encryption could take place over it. You'd have to have a relatively dense concentration of people depending on the technology used, but with multiple discreet hookups to the land-line Internet you could serve patches of a city, and it's access to the world wouldn't be completely cut off if one connection was brought down.
I've been toying with the idea, and I realize there are some serious limitations wrt range and reliability, but it could be a start. Wouldn't be anonymous, but it's not like AOL could shut off my access to it. COngress isn't especially likely to pass a law outlawing wireless networking equipment, seeing as many wireless companies contribute generous sums to political parties.
They've had a month to get the patch. If they haven't by now, whenever they get back from Pluto, they can use a friend's cable modem or a POTS modem and get the relatively small patch. I'm finding it hard to generate any sympathy for people still infectd by this virus.
The only thing that's going to "let it die" is if the stupidity/incompetence that this virus so neatly reveals is cured and people patch their fucking servers. Until then, there's plenty to talk about. Hell, there's more to talk about. It's getting close to a month that systems have been getting hit by this virus and people are still being infected when an easy solution has been available for over two months. What planet are these people on?
"Aiport" isn't a standard. It wasn't even developed by Apple. They license the technology in Airport from Compaq. Oh, how droll. Ha ha. 'Tis to laugh. If you're gonna make a joke, at least make it funny.
PPTP? Don't make me laugh. At least cleartext doesn't insult the intelligence of a would-be attacker.
Across-the-Internet connections were and are IPSec encrypted. However, when I pull down confidential documents onto a "home wireless LAN" there's more than a little likelyhood that anyone who is either sniffing my wireless LAN will see it as I quickly pull it from my main box to my latop while I'm on the can or outside lounging or watching TV and doing work. Preventative security isn't just about putting encryption everywhere. Realizing and minimizing the risk inherent in the fact that your employees are human beings and don't follow all the rules to the letter is just as important.
And if you bother to try and make every single connection that occurs inside your home wireless LAN IPSec 3DES encrypted, how the hell do you ever get anything done?
That pretty much convinced me it was junk. I'll stick to copper for anything I particularly care about, thanks.
Or am I completely fucking nuts?
Just think what'll happen when someone evolves this thing to use an exploit where there is no patch available. Or more than one exploit. Or a cross-platform virus.
We won't see something that destroys hardware last too long, because destroying hardware doesn't promote the expansion of the virus. Something that slows you down but doesn't kill you outright is far more likely to stick around long enough to get spread. Code Red, Code Red 2, and other "worms" are far more virus-like than most "viruses". Melissa, SirCam, and the like are merely trojans. They require users to interact with them. Code Red, Code Red 2, and the original Internet Worm replicate of their own volition and go out and find other infectable systems so they can repeat the process. Sounds a lot more like a biological virus to me.
These kinds of statistics convince people. The attitude of "This is just better because it does all this crazy stuff and they're really nice guys and you just really should stop using those nasty mp3s because the format was made by mean people that we don't like anymore," isn't going to get you anywhere. Regular people are going to say "I'm from Missouri, show me" and demand proof before they throw away their incompatiple mp3 players or pay more money for a new player that supports .ogg files. I demand proof before I stop using mp3 and put through the time and effort needed to get people who I might send a file to to stop using mp3.
And you know what the hell of it is? MP3 was the darling of the pseudo-underground music trading scene that most of the people posting against it now were part of. The record companies, the sworn enemies of many posting here, would give anything if they could get put the mp3 genie back in the bottle. And you can STILL ENCODE HIGH QUALITY MP3S FOR FREE. And the fair weather friends after all that crap, and the insane success they helped make, tell it to go screw itself and go over to someone else's house because mp3's parents turned out to be jerks. I'm glad I didn't grow up with any of you.
Is .ogg a more compact method? Can I fit more of my collection onto CDROM in .ogg than .mp3 at equal sound quality? Patented algorithm or not, I can still get my hands on an .mp3 encoder for free. The patent holder can scream and bitch all they want, but until they somehow come up with the ability to effectively limit my access to .mp3 encoding software, I don't see that as much of a downside. They're sure as hell not getting any money from me. My friends and anyone I'd send a piece of audio to is far more likely to have a .mp3 capable device or software player.
VHS let you do more with less. Quality be damned. I've got a couple South Park episodes in .rm format and while the quality isn't great it get the point across and is enjoyable to watch. Why should I bother with a DVD that has better quality picture and sound when I've got something usable and can concievable fit an entire season's worth of shows on a CD instead of 4 episodes? If .ogg can't do it smaller, then what exactly can it do that would make me and anyone else use it? What's it's pitch?
As a certain commercial operating system gets more an more bloated, larger and larger files are less noticed. How long before a 1-2MB virus with a couple dozen attack types built in starts making the rounds?
Super Mario 64 shouldn't have even been on the list. Super Mario 3 should've taken it's place. Now there was a platform game.
A wonderful, idealistic vision. Only problem is that it's purely idealistic. Ever hear the phrase "too many chiefs, not enough indians"? Everyone cannot lead. By definition, if you want to be a lead, you've got to have followers. If no one had followers, nothing would get done. Anyone with a great idea wouldn't have anyone to help implement it with. No decisions would ever get made because everyone would be second guessing everyone else.
A call for less ignorant followers I can agree with, but a world with just leaders is a world where nothing of consequence gets done. Followers are more important than leaders. The followers need to choose their leaders with more care.
And hell, thanks to a screwup on my part, I'd been running 0.8.1 for the last month or so on Linux and hadn't noticed any significant difference. Great job guys!
Is glibc GPL or public domain? I don't know for sure, but if it is, and you link anything to the glibc sources, you must release that as GPL. Ad infinitum, IIRC.
This may be the correct interpretation of the GPL, and if so, you're going to see a huge dropoff in Linux support. FreeBSD here we come.
Also, this could be of use in generating keys for other encryption schemes.
Trash dumps will become prime real estate again as a source of unused and unwanted raw materials. Want to get rid of nuclear weapons? Blanket your enemy's missile bases with nanomachines that melt the fissable material/destroy the firing mechanism/turn the whole missile to goo. Toxic waste cleanup (aside from nuclear waste, as the stuff will still be radioactive broken down) would be a breeze. Just neatly break apart all those nasty molecules into friendly elements. Nanomachines that scrub CO2 from the atmosphere. Rebuild the ozone layer (this would be harder, but I imagine still possible).
Well, not really, but big shiny evil looking denial of service attacks are far more headline grabbing than grabbing a random personal file and sending that out. For most of America (and myself) the chances of something actually damaging getting sent out via SirCam is slim to nil. Possibly embarassing? Yeah, but embarassment isn't an ability that most Americans have. The people that need to care about SirCam are the guvmint and big corporate honchos and they don't consume the majority of news...
This gets into some tricky legal issues. As far as I know, if your company provides encryption software to you, then you are legally obligated to give them your key(s). If they allow you to use encryption software but don't provide it, then they can't legally require you to give them your keys. IANAL of course, and and there's probably a far more accurate way of describing this, but that's how it's been explained to me.
The problem with that is that most people have better things to do with their lives than mess around with OSes. Someone who is a big shot lawyer has a few more important things to worry about than figuring out how to use this or that operating systems because it's "better". People want results from their computers, and they don't have the time to learn complitacted systems. They want the easiest one, because they're forced to use computers (at least in the business world). They hear all this jazzy stuff about the Internet and they want to be part of it and see all this stuff that WE are marketing to them. We of course conveniently forget to mention that you have to spend a serious amount of your already rapidly decreasing free time learning stuff "if you want to get the full power out of it". Most people are going to tell you to screw, and go for AOL which gets them an expeciance that they are happy with, without spending god knows how many hours it took us to learn it. Adults aren't kids anymore. We have work and other responsibilites that we didn't have when we and kids today have. We had gobs of relatively unstructured time where we could poke around and make mistakes and the like. If you really don't believe that people who don't want to take the time to learn about computers shouldn't buy them, then I suggest you find work in another field because the only reason most of us techies have our jobs is because those lazy people want computers that they are easily able to make all the neat stuff we talk to them about work. If your way isn't easy, they'll just find one that is. Make computers too hard? People will go back to pen-and-paper and typewriters faster than you can blink. It's a whole lot easier to pick up a pen and write a letter than wrestling with a "powerful" but hideously complex system in order to get it working to the level where you can send an e-mail to someone.
Hence the attraction of the various console gaming systems. No worries about whether the testers thought your video card was worth the extra time working out the few major problems it causes. No worrying about whether you need A3D or EAX to get good sound out of it. No worrying whether the minimum system requirements on the back of the box mean "minimum for a decent playing experience" or "minimum to get the splash screen to come up and lock up the computer". When you buy a game for your Playstation 2, you have 100% certainty (barring flaws in the manufacturing process and COMPLETELY incompetent coders) that the game will load and run on your machine. Yeah, some peripherals are required, but they're shown prominently on the back with simple icons so even the dim have a chance of understanding it. Most of the people I know have conniptions trying to deciper the requirements on PC software. Even some of the computer literate people have issues.
The main problem, as with almost everything in the tech industry, is developing a standard, and having enough people sign on to that standard to make it viable. In the Linux world that isn't too much of an issue, as Linux can run on just about everything. Make a standard, Linux will 9 out of 10 times be able to work on it, and the 10th time will just take a bit of hacking by someone to fix. The greater Windows-based world (and I mean greater as in larger, not better) doesn't have that luxury. It'd turn the greater world of software into something much like the game industry is. You'd have Office for Compaq, Office for Dell, Office for Gateway, etc. Mac people aready deal with this kind of situation.