When you're on a homogeneous environment it's easy to build for the specific platform.... Thankfully it doesn't appear to be popular for new projects, but there's a lot of old business systems out there.
That's because it is being replaced by another homogeneous environment: XHTML + ECMAScript + CSS.
True, those old environments will still need to exist for a long time. I work at one of 'em (and we're still on IE6). But that's no reason why it needs to be enabled in the browser by default. Make ActiveX a separate plugin download that business have to intentionally download and push out to their users.
Err, you can still run interpreted programs on a filesystem mounted noexec:
~$ python myprogram.py
A sufficiently clever user could use an interpreter to write his own dynamic linker and thereby run binaries too.
Hahaha... use an interpreter to write a dynamic linker? No, that's what a masochist would do. A sufficiently clever user would take out the hard drive and mount it in another machine (or boot a rescue CD... after shorting the BIOS password reset jumper to re-enable booting from CD) then give himself back whatever permissions he wanted:)
It's like Mitnick said: if I have physical control of your computer, it's not your computer!
I use Windows right now instead of Linux because I don't feel Linux is ready for the desktop, but most of my partitions for "extra data" are formatted using the second extended filesystem (Linux's "base" stand file system) and read in Windows using ext2fsd because I don't want my data to be held hostage by Microsoft patents.
So, yes, I really want Linux to succeed.
Storing your most of your "extra data" in ext2? Wow, you're really sticking it to the man, aren't you?
(BTW thanks for spelling out what ext2 was for the rest of us, we may not have figured that one out...)
Verizon's 2008 operating margin was 17.34%, their return on average equity was 13.93%, neither are particularly stellar or out of line. Exxon and GE are similar, Walmart is lower for margin and higher for return. Basically they are an average Bluechip stock.
Your silly little "facts" and "numbers" have no place in the effort to make excuses for Obama's enlightened budget, please keep them to yourself. Obama says that if we make less than $250k then we won't pay another dime! So we need to make sure these big bad companies pay a fair price for their use of our spectrum...
Wow, you must work for my employer; we also have a bunch of clueless, lazy admins who would rather stick their fingers in their ears and shout "LA LA LA, sorry too busy" instead of keeping abreast of current technology and trying to find innovative ways to do more with less. Instead it's the guys who actually figure out ways to save their company money -- even though that isn't in their job description -- that will be moving up the value chain.
I've been trying for five minutes to upload such a photo, converted to ASCII art via jp2a, but Slashdot's junk filter keeps blocking it. Just trust me that it would have been hilarious.
Exactly. People can whine "well they shouldn't have broken the web in the first place" all they want, and while I agree with that sentiment, it doesn't change the fact that we are where we are and need to move forward. I think the approach they're taking is the best possible one.
Look, you can talk about bad security all you want, but the only difference between ActiveX and an xpcom plugin in firefox is that ActiveX would auto-install. Other than the fact that IE allows/allowed for auto installs, the two technologies are practically identical.
The problem is not ActiveX, its that IE would automatically install them.
No, the problem is that Microsoft promoted ActiveX as a way for web developers to add extra functionality to their sites. Their goals were to compete with Java and lock users and web developers into IE and Windows. The auto-install bit is only a side effect of that, so that the user experience would be as seamless as possible, security be damned.
So now there are still lots of sites (especially on large intranets) that require ActiveX for some business-essential functionality. I guess Microsoft succeeded to some degree in that these companies can never move from IE.
By contrast, Mozilla never promoted XPCom extensions as something that should be added to a website. In fact by default you can no longer install an extension from anywhere besides the official Mozilla Add-Ons -- Mozilla intentionally makes it more difficult to do this.
So yes, from a technical perspective they both allow native code to be executed on the system but the point is that Microsoft wanted everyone to use ActiveX as widely as possible instead of reserving it only as a means of adding functionality to the browser itself.
It's not the place to get into it, but guys, keep talking about the technology and not about things you know absolutely nothing about.
This gets modded insightful? There is no content in this post other than "You're wrong, but I'm not gonna tell you why. Just take my word for it, because I claim to be authoritative on the subject."
If you feel so strongly that the "morons" are wrong about those subjects, then either add to the discussion or STFU. "It's not the place to get into it" has never been a valid reason on Slashdot. It's called an open discussion.
If you read the post, he doesn't say that source isn't publicly available, he says there are no change logs or version-control comments available. Simply releasing a tarball of the source code goes against the spirit of most OSS projects, because it doesn't allow others to easily see what changes were made, when they were made, and why.
You almost didn't elect this man because he didn't wear a USA flag lapel pin. I can only imagine how 4 years of McCain would've been different.
It's been less than a week and already you're declaring his presidency a resounding success because of a vaporware website announcement? Let's see how well he's doing 6-12 months from now, once the honeymoon period is over and he and the Dems in Congress have actually had to solve some difficult issues.
The KDE dev-team clearly communicated to the world that 4.0 and the next few releases would not be a full alternative to the 3.5-series.
And Microsoft clearly communicated to the world that "Vista Capable" meant that it could only run Vista Basic, but they're getting sued anyway. Because even if they clearly communicated that their usage of the term "capable" was significantly different from what an average person would take the word to mean, it's still misleading. Just like releasing a.0 version of software with "tons of features missing" is misleading.
I'm using H&R Taxcut this year, probably the only software I still purchase on a regular basis.
Have you tried TaxAct.com? Their $17 "Ultimate" bundle includes both Federal and one State, plus e-filing for both is included! I got so sick of TaxCut and TurboTax becoming more and more expensive each year, and either charging me to e-file or else making me send in a rebate. I've used all three, and TaxAct is as good as the others.
Plus unlike the others they don't play the Vista game of offering multiple versions each with different features that try to get people to pay more out of fear they'll get stuck with the wrong one. It handles self-employment income, capital gains, deductions, etc. all in one package. I had my reservations at first since it costs about 1/3 of the others but I used it last year and was very pleased.
There is the option to uninstall or never install a lot of the little features in Windows. You can also quite easily disable many of the devices. If you can figure out how to do that with Linux, it's even easier in Windows. Bloat or not, we still have the ability to turn off or get rid of a lot of the things you don't want.
OK, I'd like a machine that runs as a webserver and nothing else. In such a scenario, having a GUI is obviously unnecessary and further increases the attack surface, so how do I disable it?
The difference is one of leadership. I'm not particularly a fan of Bush but I guarantee you soon after Obama was elected, Bush made it very clear to all of his staff that there would be no vandalism, no pranks, and that the transition would be carried out with the utmost professionalism, grace, and respect. Because, all of his other faults aside, that's just the kind of person Bush is.
And Clinton didn't do that, because that's just the type of person he is. So whether the vandalism was $15,000 or $150, Clinton let it happen because of a lack of leadership and professionalism.
Same thing happened to me back in December. I too have a Chase credit card. My card got declined on a couple purchases so I called them about it. They knew exactly which charges were fraudulent and had already reversed them and closed the card so they could send another with a new number.
Interesting that the charges were rather small.. a $5 Netflix charge, maybe a couple $20 or $30 charges, and out of the dozens of legitimate charges per month my wife and I make, they knew which ones were bogus.
The point is that you are going to annoy somebody... At least the Obama camp knows that there is an Internet! And that it is not made of tubes....
Stop making excuses for him. His team picked the wrong choice this time, plain and simple, and it's the job of those who know better to point it out. They could have streamed in multiple formats or done any number of things to make it more accessible, but they screwed up and went the MS-only route.
I want Obama and his team to dedicate 100% of his time to figuring out those problems, and until they're under control I couldn't possibly care less what kind of technology is being used to stream his events.
That's a ridiculous position, and you have obviously never been in a leadership position (much less an executive one) if you think like that. The concept that the President should only concentrate on a small handful of difficult issues at a time is unrealistic. The world isn't going to stop and wait while Obama figures out these things for the first time. To his credit, he has picked a lot of really smart people to help him out but he also has to figure out how to use them effectively.
Do you really think that he will better be able to solve the problems you mention if his entire team "dedicates 100% of their time" to them as you suggest? What exactly is Julius Genachowski (his much-ballyhooed, pro-net-neutrality pick for FCC chief) going to contribute to getting us off of foreign oil?
There are always going to be very tough, high-priority issues. Right now there are more of them than at many other times. It doesn't mean that he can simply ignore all of the other issues, many of which are very important to a lot of people. Obama was so over-hyped by the media that now everyone has unrealistic expectations of his ability and he's going to find out very quickly that his honeymoon period will be very short-lived.
But that doesn't mean that those of us who care about neutrality, openness, and software freedom, and who happen to believe that the solutions to those problems will have an extremely profound impact on our future lives and society as a whole, should sit around while he shuts out a large percentage of the public and give him a pass simply because there are other bigger problems to solve as well.
Solving the big problems gets all of the press, but solving the thousands of little problems are what makes a truly successful President (or any executive for that matter). It doesn't mean that Obama himself has to take time out of his day to decide which technology will be used to stream the inauguration. It means he needs to appoint really smart people to make those decisions for him, and other really smart people to let him know if people are complaining because that job wasn't done correctly.
Soon after our town first got Best Buy, I continued to go to Circuit City because it's what I was familiar with. I remember the day I decided to stop going there: it was the week before Christmas, and I still had some shopping to do. I walked into the store, and there was a single cash register open (or maybe two next to each other), with a line stretching the entire length of the store. I left and never came back.
And with Circuit City, I'm hoping that whole concept of "let's sprinkle random cash registers throughout the store that open and close at lazy employees' whims instead of having them all at front by the doors" model dies with it.
Then there's the encrypted wallet that I need to use for my IM passwords and such, which I must enter a password for as well (since Linux, unlike Windows, doesn't encrypt data using your login credentials).
Sure it does. Look up ecryptfs in Ubuntu 8.10. Everything in your ~/Private directory is encrypted, so just put stuff there and create symlinks to where programs look for them. I keep my Firefox and Thunderbird profiles encrypted this way.
Re:Simple shit you didn't know existed
on
Ubuntu Kung Fu
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
'man man' and 'man hier' to start.
Damn... I've been running Linux first as a server then eventually as my primary desktop since Red Hat 4 (no, not RHEL, I mean what Red Hat was before Fedora existed) and I've never seen any previous mention of "man hier". That one would have come in useful a time or two!
GP, I guess it must be a difference in learning styles... like I said, though I ran Linux server(s) for years, I just this past year switched from Windows to Ubuntu on the desktop, and though the learning curve was indeed rather steep, making the decision to jump in the deep end and go whole hog helped force me to learn. Kinda like how I learned how to drive a manual transmission by buying one:)
As far as "care and feeding"... I am continually blown away by how awesome APT and Synaptic are in Ubuntu. You can do things like switch your entire window system from Gnome to KDE and back again, upgrade software while it's running, fix broken installs, etc. all from a single interface. Third-party vendors often provide their own repositories that automatically tie in, resolve dependencies, and let you know when updates are available, again from the same interface. And you aren't forced to run system update as an ActiveX control through a crappy browser:)
And those "required" Windows apps I thought I needed? I don't miss them at all. I've either found open equivalents or realized I just didn't really need them as much as I thought I did.
Re:Ultimate ubuntu kung fu move
on
Ubuntu Kung Fu
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I've run gentoo, suse, mandrake, redhat, centos, federoa, ubuntu, and I'm sure a few others over the years and none of them have even come CLOSE to the usability of windows.
I have a feeling that I'm not the minority here, either. I runx Xming on my desktop at work and use putty's X11 forwarding to view things like etherape (wish they would write a client for windwos..that is a really neat piece of software) when I need X, and use putty for everything else.
I won't get into the usability of Windows vs. Ubuntu or others; I find Ubuntu much more usable than Windows but I guess it comes down to personal preference (plus a lot of people falsely equate "usability" with "what I'm used to"). But it's kinda ironic that you then immediately bemoan the lack of one of a Windows version of one of your favorite open source tools.
One of the reasons I prefer Linux for the desktop is precisely that: Windows will never have the quantity and quality of open source software available for it that Linux does. Sure, there are some great open source tools for Windows (like TortoiseSVN) but writing FOSS for a proprietary platform just feels wrong to a lot of open source developers/contributors (myself included).
Oh, and you really should Pascal-case "EtherApe". When I first read that I figured etherape was some type of add-on to BackOrifice. Kinda like what happened to ExpertsExchange.com when people didn't capitalize it correctly (and thus later became experts-exchange.com)
Slashdot Mirror
When you're on a homogeneous environment it's easy to build for the specific platform.... Thankfully it doesn't appear to be popular for new projects, but there's a lot of old business systems out there.
That's because it is being replaced by another homogeneous environment: XHTML + ECMAScript + CSS.
True, those old environments will still need to exist for a long time. I work at one of 'em (and we're still on IE6). But that's no reason why it needs to be enabled in the browser by default. Make ActiveX a separate plugin download that business have to intentionally download and push out to their users.
Err, you can still run interpreted programs on a filesystem mounted noexec:
~$ python myprogram.py
A sufficiently clever user could use an interpreter to write his own dynamic linker and thereby run binaries too.
Hahaha... use an interpreter to write a dynamic linker? No, that's what a masochist would do. A sufficiently clever user would take out the hard drive and mount it in another machine (or boot a rescue CD... after shorting the BIOS password reset jumper to re-enable booting from CD) then give himself back whatever permissions he wanted :)
It's like Mitnick said: if I have physical control of your computer, it's not your computer!
I use Windows right now instead of Linux because I don't feel Linux is ready for the desktop, but most of my partitions for "extra data" are formatted using the second extended filesystem (Linux's "base" stand file system) and read in Windows using ext2fsd because I don't want my data to be held hostage by Microsoft patents.
So, yes, I really want Linux to succeed.
Storing your most of your "extra data" in ext2? Wow, you're really sticking it to the man, aren't you?
(BTW thanks for spelling out what ext2 was for the rest of us, we may not have figured that one out...)
> Carriers cannot pass on ad valorem taxes like this
On what do you base that?
On the fact that he used a Latin phrase so he must know what he's talking about...
Verizon's 2008 operating margin was 17.34%, their return on average equity was 13.93%, neither are particularly stellar or out of line. Exxon and GE are similar, Walmart is lower for margin and higher for return. Basically they are an average Bluechip stock.
Your silly little "facts" and "numbers" have no place in the effort to make excuses for Obama's enlightened budget, please keep them to yourself. Obama says that if we make less than $250k then we won't pay another dime! So we need to make sure these big bad companies pay a fair price for their use of our spectrum...
Wow, you must work for my employer; we also have a bunch of clueless, lazy admins who would rather stick their fingers in their ears and shout "LA LA LA, sorry too busy" instead of keeping abreast of current technology and trying to find innovative ways to do more with less. Instead it's the guys who actually figure out ways to save their company money -- even though that isn't in their job description -- that will be moving up the value chain.
I've been trying for five minutes to upload such a photo, converted to ASCII art via jp2a, but Slashdot's junk filter keeps blocking it. Just trust me that it would have been hilarious.
Exactly. People can whine "well they shouldn't have broken the web in the first place" all they want, and while I agree with that sentiment, it doesn't change the fact that we are where we are and need to move forward. I think the approach they're taking is the best possible one.
Look, you can talk about bad security all you want, but the only difference between ActiveX and an xpcom plugin in firefox is that ActiveX would auto-install. Other than the fact that IE allows/allowed for auto installs, the two technologies are practically identical.
The problem is not ActiveX, its that IE would automatically install them.
No, the problem is that Microsoft promoted ActiveX as a way for web developers to add extra functionality to their sites. Their goals were to compete with Java and lock users and web developers into IE and Windows. The auto-install bit is only a side effect of that, so that the user experience would be as seamless as possible, security be damned.
So now there are still lots of sites (especially on large intranets) that require ActiveX for some business-essential functionality. I guess Microsoft succeeded to some degree in that these companies can never move from IE.
By contrast, Mozilla never promoted XPCom extensions as something that should be added to a website. In fact by default you can no longer install an extension from anywhere besides the official Mozilla Add-Ons -- Mozilla intentionally makes it more difficult to do this.
So yes, from a technical perspective they both allow native code to be executed on the system but the point is that Microsoft wanted everyone to use ActiveX as widely as possible instead of reserving it only as a means of adding functionality to the browser itself.
It's not the place to get into it, but guys, keep talking about the technology and not about things you know absolutely nothing about.
This gets modded insightful? There is no content in this post other than "You're wrong, but I'm not gonna tell you why. Just take my word for it, because I claim to be authoritative on the subject."
If you feel so strongly that the "morons" are wrong about those subjects, then either add to the discussion or STFU. "It's not the place to get into it" has never been a valid reason on Slashdot. It's called an open discussion.
If you read the post, he doesn't say that source isn't publicly available, he says there are no change logs or version-control comments available. Simply releasing a tarball of the source code goes against the spirit of most OSS projects, because it doesn't allow others to easily see what changes were made, when they were made, and why.
It is worthwhile. For this one reason. Gigawatts.
...Over the 115 day extension that's 12.3 Terawatt-hours.
Holy shit. If my math is right, I could travel back in time, if I can get a set of rabbit ears to reach 88MPH...
No, he said gigawatts. You're thinking of jigawatts.
The only way to open IE at the house is in the "run" tab, the wife and kid don't know where that is.
And if they ever figure it out, you can always run a transparent web proxy to block the MSIE user agent for all sites except Microsoft.com :)
You almost didn't elect this man because he didn't wear a USA flag lapel pin. I can only imagine how 4 years of McCain would've been different.
It's been less than a week and already you're declaring his presidency a resounding success because of a vaporware website announcement? Let's see how well he's doing 6-12 months from now, once the honeymoon period is over and he and the Dems in Congress have actually had to solve some difficult issues.
The KDE dev-team clearly communicated to the world that 4.0 and the next few releases would not be a full alternative to the 3.5-series.
And Microsoft clearly communicated to the world that "Vista Capable" meant that it could only run Vista Basic, but they're getting sued anyway. Because even if they clearly communicated that their usage of the term "capable" was significantly different from what an average person would take the word to mean, it's still misleading. Just like releasing a .0 version of software with "tons of features missing" is misleading.
I'm using H&R Taxcut this year, probably the only software I still purchase on a regular basis.
Have you tried TaxAct.com? Their $17 "Ultimate" bundle includes both Federal and one State, plus e-filing for both is included! I got so sick of TaxCut and TurboTax becoming more and more expensive each year, and either charging me to e-file or else making me send in a rebate. I've used all three, and TaxAct is as good as the others.
Plus unlike the others they don't play the Vista game of offering multiple versions each with different features that try to get people to pay more out of fear they'll get stuck with the wrong one. It handles self-employment income, capital gains, deductions, etc. all in one package. I had my reservations at first since it costs about 1/3 of the others but I used it last year and was very pleased.
There is the option to uninstall or never install a lot of the little features in Windows. You can also quite easily disable many of the devices. If you can figure out how to do that with Linux, it's even easier in Windows. Bloat or not, we still have the ability to turn off or get rid of a lot of the things you don't want.
OK, I'd like a machine that runs as a webserver and nothing else. In such a scenario, having a GUI is obviously unnecessary and further increases the attack surface, so how do I disable it?
The difference is one of leadership. I'm not particularly a fan of Bush but I guarantee you soon after Obama was elected, Bush made it very clear to all of his staff that there would be no vandalism, no pranks, and that the transition would be carried out with the utmost professionalism, grace, and respect. Because, all of his other faults aside, that's just the kind of person Bush is.
And Clinton didn't do that, because that's just the type of person he is. So whether the vandalism was $15,000 or $150, Clinton let it happen because of a lack of leadership and professionalism.
Same thing happened to me back in December. I too have a Chase credit card. My card got declined on a couple purchases so I called them about it. They knew exactly which charges were fraudulent and had already reversed them and closed the card so they could send another with a new number. Interesting that the charges were rather small.. a $5 Netflix charge, maybe a couple $20 or $30 charges, and out of the dozens of legitimate charges per month my wife and I make, they knew which ones were bogus.
The point is that you are going to annoy somebody... At least the Obama camp knows that there is an Internet! And that it is not made of tubes....
Stop making excuses for him. His team picked the wrong choice this time, plain and simple, and it's the job of those who know better to point it out. They could have streamed in multiple formats or done any number of things to make it more accessible, but they screwed up and went the MS-only route.
I want Obama and his team to dedicate 100% of his time to figuring out those problems, and until they're under control I couldn't possibly care less what kind of technology is being used to stream his events.
That's a ridiculous position, and you have obviously never been in a leadership position (much less an executive one) if you think like that. The concept that the President should only concentrate on a small handful of difficult issues at a time is unrealistic. The world isn't going to stop and wait while Obama figures out these things for the first time. To his credit, he has picked a lot of really smart people to help him out but he also has to figure out how to use them effectively.
Do you really think that he will better be able to solve the problems you mention if his entire team "dedicates 100% of their time" to them as you suggest? What exactly is Julius Genachowski (his much-ballyhooed, pro-net-neutrality pick for FCC chief) going to contribute to getting us off of foreign oil?
There are always going to be very tough, high-priority issues. Right now there are more of them than at many other times. It doesn't mean that he can simply ignore all of the other issues, many of which are very important to a lot of people. Obama was so over-hyped by the media that now everyone has unrealistic expectations of his ability and he's going to find out very quickly that his honeymoon period will be very short-lived.
But that doesn't mean that those of us who care about neutrality, openness, and software freedom, and who happen to believe that the solutions to those problems will have an extremely profound impact on our future lives and society as a whole, should sit around while he shuts out a large percentage of the public and give him a pass simply because there are other bigger problems to solve as well.
Solving the big problems gets all of the press, but solving the thousands of little problems are what makes a truly successful President (or any executive for that matter). It doesn't mean that Obama himself has to take time out of his day to decide which technology will be used to stream the inauguration. It means he needs to appoint really smart people to make those decisions for him, and other really smart people to let him know if people are complaining because that job wasn't done correctly.
Soon after our town first got Best Buy, I continued to go to Circuit City because it's what I was familiar with. I remember the day I decided to stop going there: it was the week before Christmas, and I still had some shopping to do. I walked into the store, and there was a single cash register open (or maybe two next to each other), with a line stretching the entire length of the store. I left and never came back.
And with Circuit City, I'm hoping that whole concept of "let's sprinkle random cash registers throughout the store that open and close at lazy employees' whims instead of having them all at front by the doors" model dies with it.
Then there's the encrypted wallet that I need to use for my IM passwords and such, which I must enter a password for as well (since Linux, unlike Windows, doesn't encrypt data using your login credentials).
Sure it does. Look up ecryptfs in Ubuntu 8.10. Everything in your ~/Private directory is encrypted, so just put stuff there and create symlinks to where programs look for them. I keep my Firefox and Thunderbird profiles encrypted this way.
'man man' and 'man hier' to start.
Damn... I've been running Linux first as a server then eventually as my primary desktop since Red Hat 4 (no, not RHEL, I mean what Red Hat was before Fedora existed) and I've never seen any previous mention of "man hier". That one would have come in useful a time or two!
GP, I guess it must be a difference in learning styles... like I said, though I ran Linux server(s) for years, I just this past year switched from Windows to Ubuntu on the desktop, and though the learning curve was indeed rather steep, making the decision to jump in the deep end and go whole hog helped force me to learn. Kinda like how I learned how to drive a manual transmission by buying one :)
As far as "care and feeding"... I am continually blown away by how awesome APT and Synaptic are in Ubuntu. You can do things like switch your entire window system from Gnome to KDE and back again, upgrade software while it's running, fix broken installs, etc. all from a single interface. Third-party vendors often provide their own repositories that automatically tie in, resolve dependencies, and let you know when updates are available, again from the same interface. And you aren't forced to run system update as an ActiveX control through a crappy browser :)
And those "required" Windows apps I thought I needed? I don't miss them at all. I've either found open equivalents or realized I just didn't really need them as much as I thought I did.
I've run gentoo, suse, mandrake, redhat, centos, federoa, ubuntu, and I'm sure a few others over the years and none of them have even come CLOSE to the usability of windows.
I have a feeling that I'm not the minority here, either. I runx Xming on my desktop at work and use putty's X11 forwarding to view things like etherape (wish they would write a client for windwos..that is a really neat piece of software) when I need X, and use putty for everything else.
I won't get into the usability of Windows vs. Ubuntu or others; I find Ubuntu much more usable than Windows but I guess it comes down to personal preference (plus a lot of people falsely equate "usability" with "what I'm used to"). But it's kinda ironic that you then immediately bemoan the lack of one of a Windows version of one of your favorite open source tools.
One of the reasons I prefer Linux for the desktop is precisely that: Windows will never have the quantity and quality of open source software available for it that Linux does. Sure, there are some great open source tools for Windows (like TortoiseSVN) but writing FOSS for a proprietary platform just feels wrong to a lot of open source developers/contributors (myself included).
Oh, and you really should Pascal-case "EtherApe". When I first read that I figured etherape was some type of add-on to BackOrifice. Kinda like what happened to ExpertsExchange.com when people didn't capitalize it correctly (and thus later became experts-exchange.com)