Whenever they get around to it, I'll buy one and sit it next to my Apple IIgs and my Dual G5* -- I'll have a nice little collection of "last of" computers.
Actually there's something to be said for owning computers that were the last of their kinds, since they tend to be arguably the best in whatever category they're the last of (this is assuming the manufacturer continually improves their equipment). Within that very small section of the universe, you'll always have the best!
Humm, I wonder when Sun is going to kill the SPARC...
(* Okay, so I know that the Dual G5 wasn't really the top of the line of the G5s, the Quad was, but I couldn't afford it.)
Well there's precious little to report out of Iran or North Korea; so I suppose one could say that the China-bashing is a good thing (if you're Chinese), in that it shows that something there is happening. It's the places where you know a lot of censorship happens but that you never hear any internal criticism out of that are probably worse to live in, because that means the censorship is working. In China, it's not -- at least not all of the time.
Of course that could just be because they're the biggest, so there are necessarily more examples like this for us to concentrate on.
Agreed. If I was going to be a journalist today (which I am not) and if I was interested in being one of those hard-hitting investigative reporters, I sure as hell wouldn't look for employment at a print newspaper.
I think there will always be a place for the wire services (Reuters, etc.), and reporters that they send out to various places to report facts, maybe they'll take up the investigative-journalism side. There's no reason why they would be put out of business, if they're actually a source of new information (instead of just parroting back information that's already available elsewhere).
Or maybe radio networks will start hiring journaists themselves in order to generate stories, if they can no longer just read the paper news headlines on the air and rehash them every morning. NPR, for example, probably has the resources to employ quite a few real journalists, if they really wanted to. (And might very well do so already.)
But like I said, I'm not a journalist. Why am I not? Other than that I'm just not sure it's my forte, there's precious little money in it compared to other careers. There's no money in it because there's really not much demand for "good journalism" by the public. The Internet isn't going to change that. You can't make people care about "hard-hitting journalism," when really all they want to see when they get home from work is a few feel-good, human interest stories about dogs saving people from burning buildings. And if the Internet and other new forms of media allow people to choose what they want to see, more power to them. It's not anyone's right to force information down anyone else's throat, no matter how ignorant or uninformed they may be.
The "stuff that does the wipin'" are all in silos in North Dakota. And on submarines in various oceans.
Although I think two minutes is a bit of a stretch. I think it would take at least 20 or so to annihilate everyone on a particular continent. Give another few months or so for the rest of the world.
Breaking the legacy metadata support might have wide-ranging implications for users that still use Carbon applications (which might use the Type/Creator codes), or boot into/use Classic occasionally.
Really what they need to do (IMO) is twofold: first, they need to stop the Terminal from just executing a script from a double-click if the script doesn't start with a shebang line. I can't think of any reason why any user (who isn't capable of just editing the file and putting in the line) needs to do this, or any functionality that it would break. This wouldn't affect forced-execution of a shell script without the shebang, if it was done from the command line.
Also, and perhaps more importantly, they need to give the user some sort of visual indicator that what they're about to click on is an executable file. That would stop a lot of human engineering exploits, or at least shift blame for them from the OS onto the user, where it belongs. I think users would probably pay attention to something like that, since it would be anomalous: people may be stupid, but if something seems wrong or different, they usually notice. If every JPG you've ever seen has looked one way, and all of a sudden you have a JPG that looks different... that ought to give anyone pause. Maybe not enough pause to stop them from clicking it... but I bet they won't ever do it again.
This is true, but the script could still "rm -rf ~" and hose your home directory without asking for an administrator password, provided you were the owner of it and everything in there. It wouldn't spread or zombiefy your system or anything, but it would still be rather nasty.
FWIK, the JPG extension wasn't really necessary. I think that if you had a properly-formatted shell script, that starts with a shebang line, even if you give it a bad filename extension, Safari will still recognize it as "unsafe" and won't execute it.
The problem occurs when you have a shell script without the shebang line, and it's given Type/Creator codes so that it will open in Terminal.app (which will happily execute shell script without a shebang line, in the user's default shell). The name is unimportant; the only purpose it would serve is to make the user more likely to click on it on the web page. Which, as other people have pointed out, isn't really necessary since the file could be set to download automatically by the page. Clicking a link ON the page isn't necessarily required.
Actually that's not really the cause of the problem.
The problem here is a combination of two mis-behaviors: one, that the Terminal will still execute a shell script if you double-click on it, even if that script isn't marked as being an executable file; two, that Safari thinks a shell script is "safe" as long as it doesn't start with a shebang line.
The second is more serious: Safari will only automatically open files that it thinks are "safe," if you tell it to (I'm not sure if this is the default or not). A properly formatted shell script -- one that starts with a shebang line -- is correctly recognized as "unsafe" and not automatically launched. However, a shell script WITHOUT the shebang line is interpreted as being "safe," and thus automatically opened after it completes downloading. Thus, Terminal opens it and attempts to run it in the user's default shell. Since most Mac users use Bash, it's not hard to write a script that will function on almost any Mac OS box out there.
There are a number of ways to remove the vunerability: disable the "Automatically open Safe Files" feature in Safari is the easiest. I've also heard it suggested that moving the Terminal.app bundle out of the Applications folder will screw up most scrips that rely on absolute paths in order to work, although I'm not sure I trust that. (Or I suppose that you could just change to some really obscure default shell that uses a syntax so different from Bash that a Bash script will never run...)
This exploit doesn't rely on the user -- at least as I understand it -- to click on anything or be "fooled" by a icon. That certainly still exists, although I'm not sure whether I'd agree that it's a flaw or not. It's simply a consequence of having icons that are editable and don't necessarily reflect the type of file they're attached to. Personally I think the solution to that problem is to make some sort of overlay (similar to the ones used for aliases) for executable files. A few days ago this came up in discussion and someone with a knowledge of the subject said it would be fairly easy to do. That would go a ways in fixing the similar issue in Mail that you described.
Okay... maybe I'm the only one here, but I was very confused for a moment. I thought they were referring to "N-Gauge," as the very small size model railroad track, but had just misspelled it. (Wikipedia tells me that it's properly called "N Scale" now.) I got all interested there for a minute -- I had visions of model trains you could control from your cell phone.
I wonder what a model train would look like, if Nokia made them. Hummm...
The first refers to a delta, a difference of +/- 4 minutes. The second is an absolute value of 4 minutes per mile.
So if you're running a 10 minute mile, and increase your speed so that you're doing a 6 minute mile, you've increased your speed by four minutes per mile. You are NOT however, "running a 4-minute mile."
Perhaps if you have a digital camera and a spare few minutes sometime, you'd be willing to take a photo of that..? The photo they're using on the Wikipedia page for DECstation right now is really crummy.
I'd take one, but sadly, I don't own a DEC myself. Always had a soft spot for them, though. Someday...
Is there any sort of TiVo-like application for doing this (I'm thinking Mac or Linux)? I looked at StreamRipper, and it seems fairly straightforward if you just want to capture the stream and separate it into files -- how are you scheduling it? Just with a cron job, or is there some frontend/scheduler that I'm missing?
I've actually been toying for a while with the idea of getting a Griffin Radio Shark, which basically does "TiVO for Radio," but no sense in listening to a recorded FM broadcast if I can get a MP3 feed instead. (All I'm interested in listening to is NPR, basically.)
What would really be handy is a single program that displays programming info, schedules recordings, saves them, and then adds them to an RSS feed that you can subscribe to from another computer with iTunes as a Podcast, to have it loaded on your iPod automatically. Actually I have to think somebody has already made something that does that.
DST helps urban factory workers and industry far more than it helps farmers, who are by and large unaffected either way.
The rationale I have always heard for it is that, by keeping the "work day" as much as possible in line with actual physical daylight, you keep factories' lighting requirements at a minimum.
That was, of course, back when factories actually had windows in them.
But Mac OS X already provides that built-in, as does OpenOffice on Linux or some of the printer-driver plugins for Windows.
Basic PDF creation isn't in dispute. It's the other functions of Acrobat that seem to be missing from the FOSS arsenal: document signing, markup, commenting, and verification. Also, making forms that can be filled in and printed, without accidentally altering the form proper, is a pretty big deal for a lot of people (maybe GhostScript does that now, although I sort of doubt it).
Creation is only the first step in a workflow, what needs to happen now is the rest of the tools, hopefully in a way that's compatible with Adobe's "reference" ones.
FYI, it's sitting in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum annex, which is in Chantilly, VA. They also have the SR-71 and the Enola Gay there.
Dulles is the airport right down the road.
I've never been there (yet) because they nick you $12 bucks for parking (gee thanks, can you just take that out of my tax return instead?), so it's not something you do just to kill a few hours. At least, I don't.
There are a lot of obnoxious document formats out there, not the least of which is the ubiquitous DOC, but PDF really isn't bad. At least the basic specifications are open, there are a bunch of Free implementations, and there's a free (beer) reference implementation in the form of Adobe's Reader to compare against.
As I've said in a few other posts now, it's really only the signing/markup/commenting software that's in short supply, if you're not willing to shell out for Adobe's gear.
To be perfectly honest, if someone is just sending me a document to read or review, that I don't need to actually edit, I would MUCH prefer that they sent me a PDF then to send me a MS Word DOC.
the Adobe authoring tools are expensive, and hence not widespread.
Bingo -- you got that part right, at least.
However, that's the problem that developers ought to be looking to solve, the void that needs to be filled. There's no demand for another format, but there is a demand for better/cheaper/free authoring tools.
Until I discovered a little FOSS printer-driver, I had the entire OpenOffice suite installed on my work machine so that I could make PDFs from Word documents. Talk about going after a fly with a bazooka. (I couldn't use any of the more common freeware tools for this purpose because many of them have non-commercial restrictions. GPL stuff is okay, however.)
Frankly I think it's rather appalling that Windows doesn't have PDF export built into it natively yet. (But then again, the list of things I find appalling about Windows is rather extensive...) That's pretty much all it would take to kill any and all competing "alternative" formats overnight.
I've never run into anyone that really wanted to send a document that included an embedded applet. Maybe there's a demand for it somewhere, but I've never gotten close.
I do know that people want to be able to send "electronic paper" documents to each other all the time -- they want to get it looking just so, and then freeze it in place so that its appearance doesn't change and send it out to a dozen people for markup or approval. Ideally, people on the receiving end wouldn't be able to alter the actual document's text at all, they'd be able to comment/sign it, or visibly mark up an overlay (like an alpha layer) which could then be sent back to the document's creator, combined with other people's markups, and used in further editing.
I just don't see the market scrambling for an e-document format that lets them embed JS applets, especially when a crummy implementation of that technology could quickly become an annoyance and/or security risk.
You can do this with any web browser. Or at least I can -- File:Print:Save as PDF. This is on Mac OS X. The generated PDF looks exactly like the page would if it was printed from that browser. (So one that you print/export from Firefox might look slightly different than one you export from Safari.)
I've never had reason to try it, but I'm sure there are similar things on Linux. In fact there's probably some slick way there to write a script or small program that would render the HTML page and then export it to a PDF, using the rendering libraries from Gecko or Konqueror and the pdf libraries. I don't know how one interacts with those libaries, or what commandline HTML rendering and PDF creation tools exist, but maybe it could be done just through a shell script.
And it was pointed out to me not long ago that there is a free printer driver for Windows that gives all applications PDF export capabilities, similar in usage Mac OS X's.
I still run across a few sites a day that have links set to open in new windows. It's obnoxious; if I want the link to open in a new window, I'll open it in a new window. It takes a right-click and about an eighth-inch slide of my mouse cursor to do it.
I browse with sounds, animations, Flash, and JS disabled, so the other part of your comment doesn't really apply to me very much, but as a general rule I find anything designers do that prevents me from using curl to grab the content obnoxious, and less likely that I'll actually view it.
PDF is usually used as an electronic equivalent of giving someone a paper document. Just like a printout, it's not easily editable. That doesn't mean it can't be marked up or commented, stamped or signed, but you can't easily change what's written on the page.
That's a feature, not a limitation. There are enough 'editing' formats out there -- when somebody sends something out as PDF, it's usually because they are at the stage in paper-document process where they'd normally be printing it out and handing it around, either with a red pencil to mark up or with a pen to sign (or just for reading).
MS Word "doc" and hopefully in the future, OpenOffice files will provide the editing formats. But there will still be a demand for an 'electronic paper' format where you can only write on the document, not change it substantially, and where it looks the same to everyone.
Unfortunately, while there are alternatives to Adobe's software for viewing and creating now, the markup and signing/verification market is still basically dominated by them. I'd love to see some free tools for doing stuff like commenting, reviewing, and signing. I think the FOSS community would do better to concentrate on this, than put a lot of effort into developing new distribution formats that will probably never catch on.
Slashdot Mirror
Whenever they get around to it, I'll buy one and sit it next to my Apple IIgs and my Dual G5* -- I'll have a nice little collection of "last of" computers.
Actually there's something to be said for owning computers that were the last of their kinds, since they tend to be arguably the best in whatever category they're the last of (this is assuming the manufacturer continually improves their equipment). Within that very small section of the universe, you'll always have the best!
Humm, I wonder when Sun is going to kill the SPARC...
(* Okay, so I know that the Dual G5 wasn't really the top of the line of the G5s, the Quad was, but I couldn't afford it.)
Well there's precious little to report out of Iran or North Korea; so I suppose one could say that the China-bashing is a good thing (if you're Chinese), in that it shows that something there is happening. It's the places where you know a lot of censorship happens but that you never hear any internal criticism out of that are probably worse to live in, because that means the censorship is working. In China, it's not -- at least not all of the time.
Of course that could just be because they're the biggest, so there are necessarily more examples like this for us to concentrate on.
Agreed. If I was going to be a journalist today (which I am not) and if I was interested in being one of those hard-hitting investigative reporters, I sure as hell wouldn't look for employment at a print newspaper.
I think there will always be a place for the wire services (Reuters, etc.), and reporters that they send out to various places to report facts, maybe they'll take up the investigative-journalism side. There's no reason why they would be put out of business, if they're actually a source of new information (instead of just parroting back information that's already available elsewhere).
Or maybe radio networks will start hiring journaists themselves in order to generate stories, if they can no longer just read the paper news headlines on the air and rehash them every morning. NPR, for example, probably has the resources to employ quite a few real journalists, if they really wanted to. (And might very well do so already.)
But like I said, I'm not a journalist. Why am I not? Other than that I'm just not sure it's my forte, there's precious little money in it compared to other careers. There's no money in it because there's really not much demand for "good journalism" by the public. The Internet isn't going to change that. You can't make people care about "hard-hitting journalism," when really all they want to see when they get home from work is a few feel-good, human interest stories about dogs saving people from burning buildings. And if the Internet and other new forms of media allow people to choose what they want to see, more power to them. It's not anyone's right to force information down anyone else's throat, no matter how ignorant or uninformed they may be.
The "stuff that does the wipin'" are all in silos in North Dakota. And on submarines in various oceans.
Although I think two minutes is a bit of a stretch. I think it would take at least 20 or so to annihilate everyone on a particular continent. Give another few months or so for the rest of the world.
the "play in all countries except the united states" option
Apparently that option is censored in the United States.
Unless I'm missing something? I certainly don't see it.
Breaking the legacy metadata support might have wide-ranging implications for users that still use Carbon applications (which might use the Type/Creator codes), or boot into/use Classic occasionally.
... that ought to give anyone pause. Maybe not enough pause to stop them from clicking it ... but I bet they won't ever do it again.
Really what they need to do (IMO) is twofold: first, they need to stop the Terminal from just executing a script from a double-click if the script doesn't start with a shebang line. I can't think of any reason why any user (who isn't capable of just editing the file and putting in the line) needs to do this, or any functionality that it would break. This wouldn't affect forced-execution of a shell script without the shebang, if it was done from the command line.
Also, and perhaps more importantly, they need to give the user some sort of visual indicator that what they're about to click on is an executable file. That would stop a lot of human engineering exploits, or at least shift blame for them from the OS onto the user, where it belongs. I think users would probably pay attention to something like that, since it would be anomalous: people may be stupid, but if something seems wrong or different, they usually notice. If every JPG you've ever seen has looked one way, and all of a sudden you have a JPG that looks different
This is true, but the script could still "rm -rf ~" and hose your home directory without asking for an administrator password, provided you were the owner of it and everything in there. It wouldn't spread or zombiefy your system or anything, but it would still be rather nasty.
FWIK, the JPG extension wasn't really necessary. I think that if you had a properly-formatted shell script, that starts with a shebang line, even if you give it a bad filename extension, Safari will still recognize it as "unsafe" and won't execute it.
The problem occurs when you have a shell script without the shebang line, and it's given Type/Creator codes so that it will open in Terminal.app (which will happily execute shell script without a shebang line, in the user's default shell). The name is unimportant; the only purpose it would serve is to make the user more likely to click on it on the web page. Which, as other people have pointed out, isn't really necessary since the file could be set to download automatically by the page. Clicking a link ON the page isn't necessarily required.
Actually that's not really the cause of the problem.
The problem here is a combination of two mis-behaviors: one, that the Terminal will still execute a shell script if you double-click on it, even if that script isn't marked as being an executable file; two, that Safari thinks a shell script is "safe" as long as it doesn't start with a shebang line.
The second is more serious: Safari will only automatically open files that it thinks are "safe," if you tell it to (I'm not sure if this is the default or not). A properly formatted shell script -- one that starts with a shebang line -- is correctly recognized as "unsafe" and not automatically launched. However, a shell script WITHOUT the shebang line is interpreted as being "safe," and thus automatically opened after it completes downloading. Thus, Terminal opens it and attempts to run it in the user's default shell. Since most Mac users use Bash, it's not hard to write a script that will function on almost any Mac OS box out there.
There are a number of ways to remove the vunerability: disable the "Automatically open Safe Files" feature in Safari is the easiest. I've also heard it suggested that moving the Terminal.app bundle out of the Applications folder will screw up most scrips that rely on absolute paths in order to work, although I'm not sure I trust that. (Or I suppose that you could just change to some really obscure default shell that uses a syntax so different from Bash that a Bash script will never run...)
This exploit doesn't rely on the user -- at least as I understand it -- to click on anything or be "fooled" by a icon. That certainly still exists, although I'm not sure whether I'd agree that it's a flaw or not. It's simply a consequence of having icons that are editable and don't necessarily reflect the type of file they're attached to. Personally I think the solution to that problem is to make some sort of overlay (similar to the ones used for aliases) for executable files. A few days ago this came up in discussion and someone with a knowledge of the subject said it would be fairly easy to do. That would go a ways in fixing the similar issue in Mail that you described.
Okay... maybe I'm the only one here, but I was very confused for a moment. I thought they were referring to "N-Gauge," as the very small size model railroad track, but had just misspelled it. (Wikipedia tells me that it's properly called "N Scale" now.) I got all interested there for a minute -- I had visions of model trains you could control from your cell phone.
I wonder what a model train would look like, if Nokia made them. Hummm...
The first refers to a delta, a difference of +/- 4 minutes. The second is an absolute value of 4 minutes per mile.
So if you're running a 10 minute mile, and increase your speed so that you're doing a 6 minute mile, you've increased your speed by four minutes per mile. You are NOT however, "running a 4-minute mile."
Perhaps if you have a digital camera and a spare few minutes sometime, you'd be willing to take a photo of that..? The photo they're using on the Wikipedia page for DECstation right now is really crummy.
I'd take one, but sadly, I don't own a DEC myself. Always had a soft spot for them, though. Someday...
Good thought.
Is there any sort of TiVo-like application for doing this (I'm thinking Mac or Linux)? I looked at StreamRipper, and it seems fairly straightforward if you just want to capture the stream and separate it into files -- how are you scheduling it? Just with a cron job, or is there some frontend/scheduler that I'm missing?
I've actually been toying for a while with the idea of getting a Griffin Radio Shark, which basically does "TiVO for Radio," but no sense in listening to a recorded FM broadcast if I can get a MP3 feed instead. (All I'm interested in listening to is NPR, basically.)
What would really be handy is a single program that displays programming info, schedules recordings, saves them, and then adds them to an RSS feed that you can subscribe to from another computer with iTunes as a Podcast, to have it loaded on your iPod automatically. Actually I have to think somebody has already made something that does that.
Greater truth was never written. I might have to sig that... :)
Like this.
DST helps urban factory workers and industry far more than it helps farmers, who are by and large unaffected either way.
The rationale I have always heard for it is that, by keeping the "work day" as much as possible in line with actual physical daylight, you keep factories' lighting requirements at a minimum.
That was, of course, back when factories actually had windows in them.
That's a replacement for Distiller, granted.
But Mac OS X already provides that built-in, as does OpenOffice on Linux or some of the printer-driver plugins for Windows.
Basic PDF creation isn't in dispute. It's the other functions of Acrobat that seem to be missing from the FOSS arsenal: document signing, markup, commenting, and verification. Also, making forms that can be filled in and printed, without accidentally altering the form proper, is a pretty big deal for a lot of people (maybe GhostScript does that now, although I sort of doubt it).
Creation is only the first step in a workflow, what needs to happen now is the rest of the tools, hopefully in a way that's compatible with Adobe's "reference" ones.
Really? I thought it was Skylab 2.
...Enterprise (sitting in a museum in Dulles VA)
FYI, it's sitting in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum annex, which is in Chantilly, VA. They also have the SR-71 and the Enola Gay there.
Dulles is the airport right down the road.
I've never been there (yet) because they nick you $12 bucks for parking (gee thanks, can you just take that out of my tax return instead?), so it's not something you do just to kill a few hours. At least, I don't.
Yeah, I'm with you.
There are a lot of obnoxious document formats out there, not the least of which is the ubiquitous DOC, but PDF really isn't bad. At least the basic specifications are open, there are a bunch of Free implementations, and there's a free (beer) reference implementation in the form of Adobe's Reader to compare against.
As I've said in a few other posts now, it's really only the signing/markup/commenting software that's in short supply, if you're not willing to shell out for Adobe's gear.
To be perfectly honest, if someone is just sending me a document to read or review, that I don't need to actually edit, I would MUCH prefer that they sent me a PDF then to send me a MS Word DOC.
the Adobe authoring tools are expensive, and hence not widespread.
Bingo -- you got that part right, at least.
However, that's the problem that developers ought to be looking to solve, the void that needs to be filled. There's no demand for another format, but there is a demand for better/cheaper/free authoring tools.
Until I discovered a little FOSS printer-driver, I had the entire OpenOffice suite installed on my work machine so that I could make PDFs from Word documents. Talk about going after a fly with a bazooka. (I couldn't use any of the more common freeware tools for this purpose because many of them have non-commercial restrictions. GPL stuff is okay, however.)
Frankly I think it's rather appalling that Windows doesn't have PDF export built into it natively yet. (But then again, the list of things I find appalling about Windows is rather extensive...) That's pretty much all it would take to kill any and all competing "alternative" formats overnight.
I think this is a solution looking for a problem.
I've never run into anyone that really wanted to send a document that included an embedded applet. Maybe there's a demand for it somewhere, but I've never gotten close.
I do know that people want to be able to send "electronic paper" documents to each other all the time -- they want to get it looking just so, and then freeze it in place so that its appearance doesn't change and send it out to a dozen people for markup or approval. Ideally, people on the receiving end wouldn't be able to alter the actual document's text at all, they'd be able to comment/sign it, or visibly mark up an overlay (like an alpha layer) which could then be sent back to the document's creator, combined with other people's markups, and used in further editing.
I just don't see the market scrambling for an e-document format that lets them embed JS applets, especially when a crummy implementation of that technology could quickly become an annoyance and/or security risk.
A nice easy to create PDF generator.
You can do this with any web browser. Or at least I can -- File:Print:Save as PDF. This is on Mac OS X. The generated PDF looks exactly like the page would if it was printed from that browser. (So one that you print/export from Firefox might look slightly different than one you export from Safari.)
I've never had reason to try it, but I'm sure there are similar things on Linux. In fact there's probably some slick way there to write a script or small program that would render the HTML page and then export it to a PDF, using the rendering libraries from Gecko or Konqueror and the pdf libraries. I don't know how one interacts with those libaries, or what commandline HTML rendering and PDF creation tools exist, but maybe it could be done just through a shell script.
And it was pointed out to me not long ago that there is a free printer driver for Windows that gives all applications PDF export capabilities, similar in usage Mac OS X's.
Amen, brother.
I still run across a few sites a day that have links set to open in new windows. It's obnoxious; if I want the link to open in a new window, I'll open it in a new window. It takes a right-click and about an eighth-inch slide of my mouse cursor to do it.
I browse with sounds, animations, Flash, and JS disabled, so the other part of your comment doesn't really apply to me very much, but as a general rule I find anything designers do that prevents me from using curl to grab the content obnoxious, and less likely that I'll actually view it.
PDF is usually used as an electronic equivalent of giving someone a paper document. Just like a printout, it's not easily editable. That doesn't mean it can't be marked up or commented, stamped or signed, but you can't easily change what's written on the page.
That's a feature, not a limitation. There are enough 'editing' formats out there -- when somebody sends something out as PDF, it's usually because they are at the stage in paper-document process where they'd normally be printing it out and handing it around, either with a red pencil to mark up or with a pen to sign (or just for reading).
MS Word "doc" and hopefully in the future, OpenOffice files will provide the editing formats. But there will still be a demand for an 'electronic paper' format where you can only write on the document, not change it substantially, and where it looks the same to everyone.
Unfortunately, while there are alternatives to Adobe's software for viewing and creating now, the markup and signing/verification market is still basically dominated by them. I'd love to see some free tools for doing stuff like commenting, reviewing, and signing. I think the FOSS community would do better to concentrate on this, than put a lot of effort into developing new distribution formats that will probably never catch on.