...that a $5 billion aircraft carrier that we really don't need during this time of budget crunches and economic weakness bears the name of the man who invented modern deficit spending in America.
Ronald Reagan's pro-spending, pro-big-government, anti-labor policies are undoubtedly going to lead my beloved country to her death. But with our large military, at least we will make a hell of a lot of noise when everything finally collapses.
Hungary is one of about ten countries worldwide that are responsible for a whopping 55% of credit card / bank / wire fraud. Serving the few legitimate customers in these ten countries often takes a back seat to preventing $3000 laptops from disappearing into the ether.
Sad but true. Even in the U.S., where our large cities are cesspools of scams and larcenies, the authorities have a better handle on the situation (mostly because the police forces here are rarely in cahoots with organized crime).
This incident raises some good points about whether or not there is a time and place for net.vigilantism. Clearly the perp behind this "linuxcsbabe" sham was guilty and deserved what he got. I can't imagine how anyone here could deny smiling as they read Fyodor's narrative about how he took over this internet troll's computer and made this sad teenager atone for his misdeeds. But the whole incident opens a Pandora's box, leaving us with many questions to ponder regarding this type of activity.
Who should take the law into their own hands? Obviously, a security expert such as Fyodor is unlikely to misidentify his aggressor. But there is a fine line between trusting somebody like Fyodor to take appropriate measures, and trusting an average sysadmin who has read some books on security but is prone to make mistakes. How can we juxtapose our need for justice with our need to make sure we punish the right person?
Are we hypocrites for denying the RIAA the right to punish those who steal from them? Certainly most of the Slashdot crowd will agree that the RIAA has no right to invade our computers looking for stolen music.
Most of us would also agree that what Fyodor did was justified (and even humourous). But we need to ask ourselves: what is the distinction between the two behavioral patterns?
Where do we draw the line?
Who is accountable? As we can see from this incident, Fyodor did indeed break the law almost a year ago, but he has not been prosecuted for it. Most of us would agree that he shouldn't have been - but technically, his troll-busting activities were illegal. Should these sorts of hacks be legalized or decriminalized under certain circumstances so that an honest, hard-working open source luminary (like Fyodor, Linus, or anyone else who commands respect in our community) does not need to fear the consequences of the actions they take to defend their networks?
I went on a tour of my condo with my trusty Fluke ampmeter today, wondering
why my power bills are so high and why my air conditioner runs constantly
despite the fact that it's only set for 80 degrees. I was shocked and
appalled at all of the energy that my electronic toys waste while they
are in their idle states. Let's take a look at the numbers and see:
TV setup. My television, amplifier, and Tivo alone took up
1.6 Amps = 185 watts, while they were completely idle. The Tivo was not
recording anything, and I verified that it was not doing anything by
telnetting in and observing that the load average was 0.00. Does it
really require 1.6 amps just to spin a hard drive and wait for a
10mW infrared signal??
Computer monitors. I run XFree86 4 in dual-head mode. My two
monitors take up 2.6 Amps = 300 watts while they are on, and a whopping 70
watts when they are turned off at the switch. It's worth noting that they
produce about a third of the light, and twice the heat, of two 150W light
bulbs.
Computer hardware. The power strip supporting my 1.6Ghz Athlon
and 1Ghz Duron draws a whopping 4.4 Amps, or 500 watts, while
both systems sit at zero load! Apparently, AMD expended significantly
more effort making sure their processors were well-equipped to start house
fires when the heatsink falls off, rather than making those Linux kernel
"CPU idle" calls actually do anything.
Uninterruptable power supplies. These were the sleeper hit of
my power measurement experiment: with full batteries and no devices on the
load side, my UPSes drew 50-80 watts of power each. I understand that
filtering power comes at a cost, but these things really should be designed
to be at least a little bit more efficient than the average space heater.
So, this brings me to my main point: why is it that my cell phone can run
for two weeks without a recharge, my digital scale can run for 10 years
(guaranteed) on a single battery, my thermostat, analog clocks, and smoke
detectors can run for 2-3 years between battery changes, but my computers
and consumer electronics have to suck up as much power as my toaster while
they are completely idle?
As long as our toys are designed to waste as much energy as legally
possible, even the most well-intentioned power conservation efforts are
doomed to utter failure.
One need to look no father than the GMO debate to see what an authoritarian
society we live in. No longer is free enterprise a basic right of a
producer; indeed, the government tends to want to ban anything it doesn't
understand or doesn't consider to be "savory." What we need the most on
this issue is a little common sense: live and let live. The government has
no business regulating genetically modified coffee until it has been proven
beyond a reasonable doubt to be a threat to public safety.
Likewise, forcing manufacturers of such products to disclose against their
will the secret processes involved in the creation of their products is a
ridiculous intrusion on their First Amendment rights (yes, that includes
the right not to speak - see the Florida citrus growers' lawsuit for
precedent). Producers should be free to label their products as they see
fit, provided that they do not make inaccurate or unprovable claims.
It is unfortunate that the zealots in the population choose to encourage
the passage of laws that ban provably safe activities, such as genetic food
modification and nuclear power. Indeed, these people need to find a way to
make their own lives sufficiently interesting that they won't have time to
try to ruin everybody else's.
One need look no further than BUGTRAQ to see that Microsoft's efforts
to produce a secure, reliable codebase have been met with unmitigated
disaster. Microsoft products are the least secure, least reliable pieces
of software in my entire company. Finally, in this article, we can see the
design methodologies that have caused Microsoft to produce millions of
lines of unmaintainable, buggy code. And we can apply that knowledge in
future Open Source projects to prevent ourselves from falling into the same
trap.
Let's take a look at some of Microsoft's more questionable practices:
UML and other modelling fads. My former employer
required the use of 65-page UML diagrams for the simplest
command-line utilities. Why? Because it was popular, and the investors
liked to make sure we were buzzword-compliant. UML is designed for
non-technical audiences, and as such it flies in the face of the
engineering goals it is designed to solve. What's good for the suits isn't
necessarily good for the engineers.
Formal checkins. These stand in the way of progress like no
other corporate "bad habit." Requiring programmers to have a supervisor
(often a non-technical PHB) "sign off" on their code prior to the
commit is ludicrous. Developer time costs $20-40 an hour - should that
time be wasted pursuading co-workers to check in and approve their code, or
should it be spent doing actual development?
Code review. Code review is a power trip and best, and a drain
on morale at worst. If a programmer cannot be trusted to develop excellent
code, he should be replaced with somebody who can. It's a tight labor
market on the developers' side, so incompetent programmers should be
spending their time reading O'Reilley books instead of playing games and
looking at porn in their parents' basement.
Large, geographically concentrated development teams. The best
work is emphatically not done by 1400 people in the Redmond campus.
The best work is done by culling experts of individual niche areas from
around the globe. Not surprisingly, this is the model that Linux and most
Open Source software uses, and that is why OSS is phenominally successful
compared with any of its proprietary competition.
As my company has avoided these measures, it has produced a superior
product for a very low development cost. I expect that other companies who
apply the same techniques will also fare better than Microsoft did in this
instance.
I am no advocate of government eavesdropping. I am a card-carrying ACLU
member and have sent funds to the EFF prior to the passage of just about
every draconian piece of legislation since the DMCA.
I see a lot of potential in this sort of technology, though. When the
government wants to crack down on terrorism / kiddie porn / the "threat" of
the day, they will usually issue tens to hundreds of search warrants and
confiscate tons of computer equipment in the name of "finding the bad
guys." They will no longer have an excuse to do that, since they will now
be able to eliminate potential suspects just by looking at light that was
leaked from their residences. This will be a true victory for those of us
(remember SJ Games?) who are scrutinized by our government without reason:
they will have no reason to break into our private homes, steal our
legitimately purchased equipment, and go on a "fishing expedition" in
search of wrongdoing. No judge could ever let them harass a criminal
suspect unless they have exhausted all other avenues and proven to the
judge that that suspect is actually engaged in wrongdoing.
How exactly would you propose that a potentially "unscrupulous, lying company" change the fact that an insider could correlate your Tivo's authentication data with its syslogs? Sure, you could ask Tivo to have the unit make two separate calls (one anonymous, one not), but that would leave them open to astroturfing problems and cost a lot of money that they don't want to spend.
The obvious fix for this problem is to buy a DirecTivo and install Extreme 2.5 with the subscription fix so your box never phones home. See the forums at DealDatabase for more info - do a search on SubTest.
...against telemarketers, at least. One of my buddies sues about one telemarketer per month on the average, and only one (1) out of 43 has actually shown up in court. Though the statute says they can only be sued for $500, the judges usually award about $1000 to $1500 to compensate him for his wasted time and effort, and to penalize the telemarketer for flouting the subpoena.
So, this could be a very effective strategy for dealing with record companies. With hundreds of lawsuits coming from different directions, they won't bother appearing in court and they will lose every case - making copy protection economically infeasible.
One of my co-workers was scamming people on eBay from home, and one of the
disgruntled customers called our local police department to whine about it.
The police came down to our place of employment and started talking with
the managers, and the managers literally turned white and started handing
over records. This was without a warrant or court order, mind you. Last I
heard, they had turned over the employee's entire HR file, his entire mail
spool, and his desktop computer. Needless to say they did not want him to
work there anymore after that day.
This brings up an interesting point, though: should Congress make it
illegal for companies to give up your personal information to law
enforcement without your consent (or a court order)?
I'm in the same boat as you - formerly ATT@home, now attbi.com. My service did not work when I plugged in the broadband router I had been using for the past six months, but it worked just fine when I removed the router. I figured that maybe AT&T was filtering known router MAC addresses on their new network (as some ISPs have been known to do), but then I changed the MAC address on the router and it still didn't work. Then I tried it on my buddy's DSL connection and it worked perfectly.
Something suspicious is definitely going on here. I think AT&T found a new way of blocking routers on their new network. Has anyone else figured out how they are doing this and how to fix it?
I used to run Windows but I have converted my desktop over to Linux. What users need to understand is that with Linux, they need to use different tools for different types of jobs; the diversity of software for Linux discourages a "one-size-fits-all" solution like the Office/IE duopoly and encourages specialization. For instance:
Mozilla and Konqueror are both excellent browsers. But I use Mozilla for fast rendering of W3C compliant pages (and avoiding KDE library overhead), and Konqueror for better IE compatibility on pages that break standards. Instead of picking a favorite, users should learn both and use each when appropriate.
Koffice and StarOffice are both good at certain things. StarOffice is much better at handling Word DOCs than Koffice, and Koffice is much better at handling PPT slides.
This is not unique to Linux. Windows systems have MS Word, Notepad, and Wordpad preloaded. Users learn that Notepad is good for text files, Wordpad is pretty useless, and Word is good for word processing.
If you know your software's abilities and learn to use the right tool for the job, you can use Linux in just about any office setting without incident.
I have yet to see any evidence that a "cyberwar" is imminent or even possible. Realistically - how many critical systems are connected to the Internet? Sure, a determined enemy might be able to take out Amazon or Yahoo, but who cares? Most Internet businesses aren't making much money anyway, so who cares if bad security puts the final nail in their coffin?
And think about other systems too. Is the phone network on the Internet? One wouldn't think so, because there's no benefit in adding the extra layer of complexity. How about the power grid? Or water supplies? There is literally zero business need to make any of these systems Internet accessible, so why would it happen? The answer is that it wouldn't, but our leaders just want an excuse to stay hysterical and keep their ratings high.
One of my colleagues used to work at Fermi Lab and he mentioned once that the light sensors that were damaged are extremely sensitive to saline solutions (such as water that has any appreciable amount of non-neutral-pH molecules). His speculation was that the deionized water that they were using had developed impurities in it, possibly from rusting pipes or failed filters, and those impurities set off the chain reaction in question.
Naturally this is all speculation, but it sounded plausible to me. Does anyone with a stronger chemistry background than mine know if this is a likely cause?
is that AMD is a huge supporter of Linux, compared with Intel. In their press releases, they do need to stress Windows compatiblility because they do need to sell to that part of the market to survive (and their sales are traditionally extremely strong in the Linux community anyway, because Linux users are more informed buyers).
Intel has been in bed with Microsoft for years, as can be seen from their use of the PE32 format in their bootloader code. AMD has not (despite naming their chips after Windows XP) been in a position or had the goal of reinforcing Microsoft.
AMD's success is crucial to Linux's success. Without a major hardware vendor who supports us, we will be left out in the cold. It is nice to see that AMD is headed for market dominance with this fast new hardware so that Linux can continue to thrive in the mass market.
...at least in niche applications. For instance, you need to use DOS to get digital satellite service for free. And the FreeDOS project lives on.
Just because Microsoft stops producing it doesn't mean it's dead. My office still uses MS Winword 1.1 on some PCs because it works and that's all they need.
Although my employer doesn't specialize in web development, per se, my boss read this book a few weels ago and he couldn't help but fall over laughing at it. We were talking about it the other day and he told me it was all simply common sense and general tips that anybody in the business would already know. The book is just a collection of buzzwords, often misused, that describe the same thing you've already been doing. How else can you explain the section headings: "Defining the Project, Developing Site Structure, Visual Design & Testing, Production & QA, and Launch & Beyond"? Give me a break. Anybody who can't figure these basic concepts out on their own doesn't belong in the computer industry. I'm sorry, but I just can't recommend this book.
-sting3r
Re:ptrace vulnerability fixed?
on
Linux 2.4.13
·
· Score: 2, Redundant
They have not stated it because of DMCA concerns (see my other post) but it has been fixed. Take a look at the patch around line 17253 (ptrace.c) to see what they did.
-sting3r
Security fixes
on
Linux 2.4.13
·
· Score: 5, Informative
What they didn't mention were a few interesting security fixes from bugs in 2.4.12, probably due to the self-imposed DMCA "gag order." Since I am not in the US, I will take the liberty of posting them here:
Changing some I2O settings now requires the CAP_NET_ADMIN privilege. Previously any user could alter these settings and possible cause a DoS (lock up the box or lock up the I2O bus).
A race condition in the inode cache was repaired. This would allow stale inode data to be used (under the right circumstances), most likely only on SMP systems.
Several potential vulnerabilities involving ptrace() have been closed, preventing a few kernel-based local root exploits.
Bugs in the USB code which could have been leveraged to obtain direct hardware access have been fixed. These bugs may have resulted in local root exploits if security-critical hardware (such as hard drives) was on the USB bus.
I really hate to say this about a figure like Alan Cox, whose contributions to the Linux project have been undeniable. But it is obvious that he is using his public role (in the kernel and in usenix) to achieve a political end: namely, the repeal of the DMCA.
Alan needs to realize that, although the DMCA does have important and evil implications for the freedom to code and speak in the U.S., it would not be used against a legitimate programmer such as himself. The people who have been targeted by the DMCA have been crackers: people who defeat lame encryption schemes and distribute point-and-click software that allows the masses to pirate. Although I fully support 2600 and Dmitri in their efforts (I have been a security engineer and I appreciate the truly talented invididuals in the field), DeCSS and the PDF utility are simply not in the same class as the Linux kernel and the other software Cox has worked on. He is simply a non-target and he needs to stop pretending that the DMCA affects him.
Although the loss of two more high speed providers in the US is inherently a Bad Thing(tm) for consumer choice and cheap Internet access, it could be a boon to Open Source adoption. How? Because most Linux distributions come with all of the software that the average user needs, all unencumbered by fascist licenses and all on a few CD-ROM discs. Having just set up a Windows 2000 box for a friend, I found myself needing to download and install dozens of separate commercial and shareware packages (such as Mozilla, WinZip, WinAmp, hardware drivers, PuTTY, and service packs). The reduced availability of shareware sites like Tucows to the average consumer makes him more likely to opt for a solution that does not require so much downloading. In addition, Windows applications are rarely foreward-compatible with OS updates, and need to be changed every few months. Thus the path of least resistance is Linux.
You may disagree and claim that somebody can sell a CD full of the necessary tools for Windows users. Indeed this may be possible, but it will never rival the ease with which a Linux vendor can put together a Linux distro. And that is because each of the shareware programs has its own unique license, which may or may not permit redistribution and/or resale. Therefore the lack of connectivity will be good for Linux and bad for the competition.
Umm, ever installed AOL? Netscape? RealPlayer? Morpheus? Ever tried to install Win2k in a multiuser (roaming profile) setting? Ever tried to copy applications from one Windows PC to another by just copying the appropriate files and registry settings?
Didn't think so. Work desktop support for a month and you'll see the difference in your blood pressure.
This is just a symptom of the generally uncooperative nature of Win32 applications. Windows software does not know how to share; how to place configuration information under HKEY_CURRENT_USER instead of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE; how not to leave necessary files in c:\windows; how not to mess up your Start menu, desktop, and registry upon installation. You think Freshmeat is full of amateurish, half-baked projects? Take a look around your local software store and you'll find the same exact thing.
In short, Windows applications are a textbook example of competition at all costs. Spyware and "gator" controls install themselves, behind the scenes, and mess with every other application. Many applications install "quick start" programs in the system tray or as services, wasting your resources and time in the vain hope that you'll use their software more often. It's no-holds-barred capitalism. Applications fight with each other over eyeballs and control of your system, and you're left with a mostly-unstable computer that blares ads at you and has a dozen security holes.
And that is why I run Linux. Because the coders who wrote my applications had respect for me, the user.
Certainly, the loss of one more tool in the fight for online privacy is
a Bad Thing(tm). But we also need to examine the upside to this
event.
First off, when ZeroKnowledge closes, all of its customers will be forced
to find another provider. That will make the other providers 1) more
profitable (assuming they aren't taking a loss but making it up in volume,
like Amazon); and 2) more effective. As mentioned in the warning to their
customers, low volume makes it easier to correlate traffic entering their
system with traffic leaving their system. When such a system gets
sufficiently large, it will be very difficult to correlate input streams
and output streams, because of the sheer number of possible matches.
Secondly, the closing of another anonymity service will make it harder for
terrorists to operate on the internet. They will have one less place to
hide. And that has a positive effect on law-abiding netizens - because
when communications are more traceable and less anonymous, the government
will have fewer excuses to pass legislation that gives law enforcement more
snooping powers. And that benefits us all.
It's sad to see that the author didn't touch on any of the possible downsides to his approach:
It's expensive. Redesigning SMS, asking the FCC for more spectrum, and fine-tuning the new protocol isn't cheap. And the wireless providers (many of whom have never run in the black) don't have much of an incentive to support anything PTP. Especially because catastrophic network failures are very rare.
Cheating. Most providers charge for SMS. How do they know that people won't try to beat the system and get SMS services for free?
Security. Unless somebody develops public key infrastructure for mobile phones, messages will be vulnerable to interception and malicious alteration. And that's probably the last thing emergency workers need to deal with.
Battery life. Ordinarily, PCS phones are only transmitting and receiving every 2-5 seconds, and they are communicating with a relatively powerful base station. This sort of thing would kill battery life. Unless all of the phone makers start using fuel cells, this is a grave concern.
Slashdot Mirror
Ronald Reagan's pro-spending, pro-big-government, anti-labor policies are undoubtedly going to lead my beloved country to her death. But with our large military, at least we will make a hell of a lot of noise when everything finally collapses.
Hungary is one of about ten countries worldwide that are responsible for a whopping 55% of credit card / bank / wire fraud. Serving the few legitimate customers in these ten countries often takes a back seat to preventing $3000 laptops from disappearing into the ether.
Sad but true. Even in the U.S., where our large cities are cesspools of scams and larcenies, the authorities have a better handle on the situation (mostly because the police forces here are rarely in cahoots with organized crime).
- TV setup. My television, amplifier, and Tivo alone took up
1.6 Amps = 185 watts, while they were completely idle. The Tivo was not
recording anything, and I verified that it was not doing anything by
telnetting in and observing that the load average was 0.00. Does it
really require 1.6 amps just to spin a hard drive and wait for a
10mW infrared signal??
- Computer monitors. I run XFree86 4 in dual-head mode. My two
monitors take up 2.6 Amps = 300 watts while they are on, and a whopping 70
watts when they are turned off at the switch. It's worth noting that they
produce about a third of the light, and twice the heat, of two 150W light
bulbs.
- Computer hardware. The power strip supporting my 1.6Ghz Athlon
and 1Ghz Duron draws a whopping 4.4 Amps, or 500 watts, while
both systems sit at zero load! Apparently, AMD expended significantly
more effort making sure their processors were well-equipped to start house
fires when the heatsink falls off, rather than making those Linux kernel
"CPU idle" calls actually do anything.
- Uninterruptable power supplies. These were the sleeper hit of
my power measurement experiment: with full batteries and no devices on the
load side, my UPSes drew 50-80 watts of power each. I understand that
filtering power comes at a cost, but these things really should be designed
to be at least a little bit more efficient than the average space heater.
So, this brings me to my main point: why is it that my cell phone can run for two weeks without a recharge, my digital scale can run for 10 years (guaranteed) on a single battery, my thermostat, analog clocks, and smoke detectors can run for 2-3 years between battery changes, but my computers and consumer electronics have to suck up as much power as my toaster while they are completely idle?As long as our toys are designed to waste as much energy as legally possible, even the most well-intentioned power conservation efforts are doomed to utter failure.
-sting3r
It is unfortunate that the zealots in the population choose to encourage the passage of laws that ban provably safe activities, such as genetic food modification and nuclear power. Indeed, these people need to find a way to make their own lives sufficiently interesting that they won't have time to try to ruin everybody else's.
Let's take a look at some of Microsoft's more questionable practices:
- UML and other modelling fads. My former employer
required the use of 65-page UML diagrams for the simplest
command-line utilities. Why? Because it was popular, and the investors
liked to make sure we were buzzword-compliant. UML is designed for
non-technical audiences, and as such it flies in the face of the
engineering goals it is designed to solve. What's good for the suits isn't
necessarily good for the engineers.
- Formal checkins. These stand in the way of progress like no
other corporate "bad habit." Requiring programmers to have a supervisor
(often a non-technical PHB) "sign off" on their code prior to the
commit is ludicrous. Developer time costs $20-40 an hour - should that
time be wasted pursuading co-workers to check in and approve their code, or
should it be spent doing actual development?
- Code review. Code review is a power trip and best, and a drain
on morale at worst. If a programmer cannot be trusted to develop excellent
code, he should be replaced with somebody who can. It's a tight labor
market on the developers' side, so incompetent programmers should be
spending their time reading O'Reilley books instead of playing games and
looking at porn in their parents' basement.
- Large, geographically concentrated development teams. The best
work is emphatically not done by 1400 people in the Redmond campus.
The best work is done by culling experts of individual niche areas from
around the globe. Not surprisingly, this is the model that Linux and most
Open Source software uses, and that is why OSS is phenominally successful
compared with any of its proprietary competition.
As my company has avoided these measures, it has produced a superior product for a very low development cost. I expect that other companies who apply the same techniques will also fare better than Microsoft did in this instance.-sting3r
I see a lot of potential in this sort of technology, though. When the government wants to crack down on terrorism / kiddie porn / the "threat" of the day, they will usually issue tens to hundreds of search warrants and confiscate tons of computer equipment in the name of "finding the bad guys." They will no longer have an excuse to do that, since they will now be able to eliminate potential suspects just by looking at light that was leaked from their residences. This will be a true victory for those of us (remember SJ Games?) who are scrutinized by our government without reason: they will have no reason to break into our private homes, steal our legitimately purchased equipment, and go on a "fishing expedition" in search of wrongdoing. No judge could ever let them harass a criminal suspect unless they have exhausted all other avenues and proven to the judge that that suspect is actually engaged in wrongdoing.
And that is good for us all.
-s3r
The obvious fix for this problem is to buy a DirecTivo and install Extreme 2.5 with the subscription fix so your box never phones home. See the forums at DealDatabase for more info - do a search on SubTest.
-sting3r
So, this could be a very effective strategy for dealing with record companies. With hundreds of lawsuits coming from different directions, they won't bother appearing in court and they will lose every case - making copy protection economically infeasible.
-sting3r
This brings up an interesting point, though: should Congress make it illegal for companies to give up your personal information to law enforcement without your consent (or a court order)?
-sting3r
I'm in the same boat as you - formerly ATT@home, now attbi.com. My service did not work when I plugged in the broadband router I had been using for the past six months, but it worked just fine when I removed the router. I figured that maybe AT&T was filtering known router MAC addresses on their new network (as some ISPs have been known to do), but then I changed the MAC address on the router and it still didn't work. Then I tried it on my buddy's DSL connection and it worked perfectly.
Something suspicious is definitely going on here. I think AT&T found a new way of blocking routers on their new network. Has anyone else figured out how they are doing this and how to fix it?
-sting3r
I used to run Windows but I have converted my desktop over to Linux. What users need to understand is that with Linux, they need to use different tools for different types of jobs; the diversity of software for Linux discourages a "one-size-fits-all" solution like the Office/IE duopoly and encourages specialization. For instance:
Mozilla and Konqueror are both excellent browsers. But I use Mozilla for fast rendering of W3C compliant pages (and avoiding KDE library overhead), and Konqueror for better IE compatibility on pages that break standards. Instead of picking a favorite, users should learn both and use each when appropriate.
Koffice and StarOffice are both good at certain things. StarOffice is much better at handling Word DOCs than Koffice, and Koffice is much better at handling PPT slides.
This is not unique to Linux. Windows systems have MS Word, Notepad, and Wordpad preloaded. Users learn that Notepad is good for text files, Wordpad is pretty useless, and Word is good for word processing.
If you know your software's abilities and learn to use the right tool for the job, you can use Linux in just about any office setting without incident.
-sting3r
I have yet to see any evidence that a "cyberwar" is imminent or even possible. Realistically - how many critical systems are connected to the Internet? Sure, a determined enemy might be able to take out Amazon or Yahoo, but who cares? Most Internet businesses aren't making much money anyway, so who cares if bad security puts the final nail in their coffin?
And think about other systems too. Is the phone network on the Internet? One wouldn't think so, because there's no benefit in adding the extra layer of complexity. How about the power grid? Or water supplies? There is literally zero business need to make any of these systems Internet accessible, so why would it happen? The answer is that it wouldn't, but our leaders just want an excuse to stay hysterical and keep their ratings high.
-sting3r
One of my colleagues used to work at Fermi Lab and he mentioned once that the light sensors that were damaged are extremely sensitive to saline solutions (such as water that has any appreciable amount of non-neutral-pH molecules). His speculation was that the deionized water that they were using had developed impurities in it, possibly from rusting pipes or failed filters, and those impurities set off the chain reaction in question.
Naturally this is all speculation, but it sounded plausible to me. Does anyone with a stronger chemistry background than mine know if this is a likely cause?
-sting3r
is that AMD is a huge supporter of Linux, compared with Intel. In their press releases, they do need to stress Windows compatiblility because they do need to sell to that part of the market to survive (and their sales are traditionally extremely strong in the Linux community anyway, because Linux users are more informed buyers).
Intel has been in bed with Microsoft for years, as can be seen from their use of the PE32 format in their bootloader code. AMD has not (despite naming their chips after Windows XP) been in a position or had the goal of reinforcing Microsoft.
AMD's success is crucial to Linux's success. Without a major hardware vendor who supports us, we will be left out in the cold. It is nice to see that AMD is headed for market dominance with this fast new hardware so that Linux can continue to thrive in the mass market.
-sting3r
Just because Microsoft stops producing it doesn't mean it's dead. My office still uses MS Winword 1.1 on some PCs because it works and that's all they need.
-sting3r
-sting3r
-sting3r
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Alan needs to realize that, although the DMCA does have important and evil implications for the freedom to code and speak in the U.S., it would not be used against a legitimate programmer such as himself. The people who have been targeted by the DMCA have been crackers: people who defeat lame encryption schemes and distribute point-and-click software that allows the masses to pirate. Although I fully support 2600 and Dmitri in their efforts (I have been a security engineer and I appreciate the truly talented invididuals in the field), DeCSS and the PDF utility are simply not in the same class as the Linux kernel and the other software Cox has worked on. He is simply a non-target and he needs to stop pretending that the DMCA affects him.
-sting3r
You may disagree and claim that somebody can sell a CD full of the necessary tools for Windows users. Indeed this may be possible, but it will never rival the ease with which a Linux vendor can put together a Linux distro. And that is because each of the shareware programs has its own unique license, which may or may not permit redistribution and/or resale. Therefore the lack of connectivity will be good for Linux and bad for the competition.
-sting3r
Didn't think so. Work desktop support for a month and you'll see the difference in your blood pressure.
-sting3r
In short, Windows applications are a textbook example of competition at all costs. Spyware and "gator" controls install themselves, behind the scenes, and mess with every other application. Many applications install "quick start" programs in the system tray or as services, wasting your resources and time in the vain hope that you'll use their software more often. It's no-holds-barred capitalism. Applications fight with each other over eyeballs and control of your system, and you're left with a mostly-unstable computer that blares ads at you and has a dozen security holes.
And that is why I run Linux. Because the coders who wrote my applications had respect for me, the user.
-sting3r
First off, when ZeroKnowledge closes, all of its customers will be forced to find another provider. That will make the other providers 1) more profitable (assuming they aren't taking a loss but making it up in volume, like Amazon); and 2) more effective. As mentioned in the warning to their customers, low volume makes it easier to correlate traffic entering their system with traffic leaving their system. When such a system gets sufficiently large, it will be very difficult to correlate input streams and output streams, because of the sheer number of possible matches.
Secondly, the closing of another anonymity service will make it harder for terrorists to operate on the internet. They will have one less place to hide. And that has a positive effect on law-abiding netizens - because when communications are more traceable and less anonymous, the government will have fewer excuses to pass legislation that gives law enforcement more snooping powers. And that benefits us all.
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