It sounds like this is splitting hairs, but it makes sense when considered in terms of the goals of the FSF and the GPL: to encourage better software through the availability of source code.
The GPL is a form of coercion, a type of strong-arming of which Godwin would be proud. No one likes being forced into doing something. They chafe. They grumble.
More importantly, when coercion is involved, all personal responsibility, all moral choice is removed. You cannot extoll the virtue of someone who adds publicly available code to an existing GPL codebase. There is no virtue invovled, for he had no choice in the matter. Without choice, there is no morality.
Contrast this with the individual who initially creates open source and gives it away to the world. `If you love something, set it free; if it returns to you...' comes to mind. If fixes and enhancements come back to him, then the author of those updates has himself made a moral decision. How much more precious a thing this is than the prisoner who did as he was coerced to do!
It is clear which man has made a moral choice, and which one has not. Coercion is fundamentally opposed to morality.
The GPL has never been about free software
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What I think you're missing is that the FSF is an oxymoron. The GPL does not create code that is necessarily gratis, and it's certainly not libre. It's full of restrictions, as your article points out. That's nothing like unfettered! It's clearly non-free. The FSF have their agenda, and these are clearly more extensive in scope than the BSD crew's.
Of course, whether you consider that good or bad is up to you. Personally, I believe that a simple, sweeping, blanket `good' or `bad' label is oversimplifying a complex matter. Obviously both licences are doing something that their authors want them to do. But let's disabuse ourselves of this maliciously deceptive `free' thing right here and now. The word was redefined by the FSF to mean something no one but lawyers, pharisees, and related zealots would find intuitive. It's a mean trick.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Drop the word `free'. It's a lie. One can continue to repeat clever sophistries until the sun goes nova, and continue to be very clever, very punny, even technically correct in at least one particular circumstance. But one is still completely misleading to virtually all the world.
A few days I was asked by a regular person -- not even a script kiddie -- whether [random software] was `freeware, or just shareware'. See that? Here's a simple test. Go out and ask 20 teenagers whether free software (which they'll call freeware) ever costs anything, and you'll find that 100% of them say, `What, are you crazy?'
Recently, I witnessed a newcomer to the net asked an oldtimer about what possible licence was on a piece of software the latter had written. The sum total of the oldtimer's response was "Do whatever you'd like with it," which surprised the newcomer, who obviously wasn't used to truly free software (unlike the FSF's insidiously deceiptful notion of the same) But what a pleasant change! Where did that complete generosity disappear to?
Let's face it. We've lost this battle. We have to stop hurting our own goals by beating a dead horse. We must instead use a real word in the way that everyone understands it. Of course gratis and libre are lovely distinctions, pero por desgracia, ocurre que todo el mundo no entiende castellano.:-)
Instead of gratis, perhaps we should say cost-free. See how clean and simple, how unambiguous that word is?
Instead of libre, we might say something more like hackable; that's my own original preference, but it has its own attendant difficulties. Less charged alternatives include changeable or mutable or legible or open source or as source code or in some cases, perhaps unrestricted. Historically, we used freely redistributable as distinct from public domain, but that's a problem term because it has the `free' bug, and doesn't specify source code.
I may not be certain about what the right word is, but I'm completely certain what the wrong word is. The wrong word is `free'. Please, please, PLEASE drop these word-games that only cause everyone on the outside to get confused just so that those on the inside get to gloat about how much smarter they are than the rest of the word. It's long past time to face the fact that we've lost the battle for this word, and perhaps time to realize that it was always the wrong word right from the get-go.
Free software is great. Don't destroy it with restrictive licences.
Linux Is Not UniX, but it can be made damn near bulletproof.
Oh please, not this again. The only people who believe that nonsense are lawyers, marketeers, and other scoundrels with neither sense nor conscience. Everyone else it merely confuses. Please stop trying to confuse people!
You might as well say that Australians don't speak English, or that Mexicans don't speak Spanish. That argument evaporates when you confront the Aussie with Spanish or the Mexican with English. Spanish is non-English, and vice versa.
Likewise, if you try to tell joe-random hapless W2K victim that Linux isn't Unix, he'll either just laugh at you, or else get highly confused. To these Prisoners of Bill, Linux certainly is Unix in every meaningful sense. Linux and BSD are not non-Unix. CP/M, W2K, MacOS, and all the other abominations foisted off on consumers are non-Unix.
Why must we continue to be Pharisaic about all this? Call a spade a spade.
As an advanced windows user (but planning on switching to something else soon) I can tell you it's pretty easy to do this: copy *.c *.c_old
No, that's in DOS (the non-operating system, not the security issue). Not in Windows. You're using a command line, not a GUI, now. The point is that GUIs cannot approach CLIs in power.
Once upon a time, I wrote a piece called GU Is Considered Harmful. I haven't updated it in a very long time, but the sentiment is truer now than ever. In reference to my old piece, a friend once sent me a copy of someone else's writings in a similar light.
> [How *does* one copy *.c to *.c.old in Windows?
One creates a new folder, calls it "Project Name 990909" (or whatever), copies the files to be archived, and pastes them into the new folder.
That's how you make a copy of each file in a different folder, with the same extension, the thing that you do in unix with cp *.c "Project Name 990909" But that isn't what was asked for. What was asked for was to make a copy of the files in the *same* folder, but with a *different* extention. That's an entirely different operation, with entirely different results, especially on a system like Windoze where the result of clicking on a file depends on its extension. I suspect that there is no way to accomplish this task in Windoze, other than changing the names of the copied files one by one.
This is typical of mouse-based UI's. The number of distinguishable mouse gestures is vastly less than the number of distinguishable things you can type on the command line. So a GUI can only do a tiny number of things compared to what a command line can do. But this tiny number is large compared to the even tinier number of things that can be done during a demo, so a GUI demos as being as powerful as a command line, and easier to use with zero training. Since most software gets sold on the basis of demos, this means that if you want to sell your app, it needs a GUI, even though this means that the set of things you can do is far poorer than the experienced user would like.
You watch TV, don't you? Aren't you plastered w/ ads every so few minutes?
No, I don't, and no, I'm not.
You shouldn't assume that everyone buys into the spamvert mentality. Not everyone is a prisoner of the American consumerist claptrap you're talking about, whether because of their geography or because they prefer something other than a lie-down-and-vege-out plug-in drug.
In short, we do not all live in a Brave New World of pervasive mind-control through spamverts, and those of us who have willfully absented ourselves from that particular horror shall not be dragged kicking and screaming into it. We'll kick the face of the spamverts. Mark my words.
``Contempt, rather than celebration, is the proper response to advertising and the system that makes it possible.'' --Neil Postman
And no, I'm not trying to stop people from making a living through honest commerce. It's the `oh boy let's torture the captive' thing I won't tolerate. It's like something out of A Clockwork Orange. I've written a bit more about adverts in my web diversity guidelines.
But it lags sorely behind in interface. The default command-line does ignore 30 years, and to be honest I have difficulty believing that any operating system still carries such an archaism.
Hold on there, guy. Calling a CLI archaic is just plain silly.
Let's think about a piano. It's a rich and complex instrument that takes many years to master. Someone without experience on it is virtually useless. Compare this now with a wind-up music box. Obviously the music box is more convenient for beginners to use. So what? Just because there's a place for a music box doesn't mean that there isn't a place in this world for a piano. Which one is more powerful, more expressive?
Not everything should be optimized for use by complete idiots. The CLI is infinitely more powerful than any GUI I've ever seen, because it tolerates and encourages communication between programs in ways never dreamt of by their authors. The Unix command line provides the developer with a broad set of powerful but flexible features that the creative mind can use to produce a custom design uniquely crafted to the particular demands of the situation.
Go out and find someone who has been at this game for many years. Now just sit back and watch them at work. They have created out of base components their own IDE, possible with SUI or GUI components, but probably not. But I guarantee you that it will be one that suits their own tastes and aptitudes. Quietly observe them edit files, move them around, compile them, debug them, test them, etc. The entire development is integrated, like a top-of-the-line German sports car: functional, powerful, and elegant. You will be absolutely astonished at the speed and ease exhibited by the native speaker of Unix in his home territory.
As on a piano, the art and skill of a CLI virtuoso can only be seen to be believed. That is the path to mastery -- all these cobbled little GUIs are expensive toys designed to sell a flashy demo using cheap tricks, and being optimized for immediate but shallow understanding rather than enduring use, are but a dim palimpsest of real tools.
Those without creative minds and agile fingers are of course welcome to hurry up with my fries. And they'll probably use a GUI to take my order, too.
but the fact that they are charging $249 does not mean it is not free software.
One can continue to repeat clever sophistries until the sun goes nova, and continue to be very clever, very punny, even technically correct in at least one particular circumstance. But one is still completely misleading to virtually all the world.
Just yesterday, I was asked by a regular person, not even a kid, whether [random software] was `freeware, or just shareware'. See that? Here's a simple test. Go out and ask 20 teenagers whether free software (which they'll call freeware) ever costs anything, and you'll find that 100% of them say, `What, are you crazy?'
Let's face it. We've lost this battle. We have to stop hurting our own goals by beating a dead horse. We must instead use a real word in the way that everyone understands it. Of course gratis and libre are lovely distinctions, pero por desgracia, ocurre que todo el mundo no entiende castellano.:-)
Instead of gratis, perhaps we should say cost-free. See how clean and simple, how unambiguous that word is?
Instead of libre, we might say something more like hackable; that's my own original preference, but it has its own attendant difficulties. Less charged alternatives include changeable or mutable or legible or open source or as source code or in some cases, perhaps unrestricted. Historically, we used freely redistributable as distinct from public domain, but that's a problem term because it has the `free' bug, and doesn't specify source code.
I may not be certain about what the right word is, but I'm completely certain what the wrong word is. The wrong word is `free'. Please, please, PLEASE drop these teen-age word-games that only cause everyone on the outside to get confused just so that those on the inside get to gloat about how much smarter they are than the rest of the word. It's long past time to face the fact that we've lost the battle for this word, and perhaps time to realize that it was always the wrong word right from the get-go.
I know some will mention VI and Emacs... I have nothing against them, but I highly doubt that I can sit down, and write a JDBC enabled piece of software with everything linked visually. Either way those are my views.
Then something is fundamentally wrong with the design of that system that its complexity should exceed mortals' ken.
> Why continue the confusion between Gratis and Libre?
Because they like to screw with people's minds. "Free" quite simply means gratis in virtually everyone's minds, and everyone knows this. The word you want for libre is "hackable". Until they figure this out, they'll continue to hurt themselves.
This is an evil I really wanted to blame on Lord Gates and the Wintel crowd, but the finger looks like it points back to rms et alios instead.
Here's some bugtraq discussion on removing the execute bits from the stack. A nicer reference in some senses is this fine paper describing a lot of technical details.
I know about the signal trampoline code. I still don't understand why it is considered imperative. There are many other possible approaches beyond making STACK pages +x.
I cannot believe that the disadvantages of selecting an alternate implementation would be greater than the advantages of not letting anybody splat their own code in a perfectly running program and have it execute that user code.
Self-modifying code may be nice for Core Wars, but it sucks for security verification.
Seems to me you've gotta be able to write them AT LEAST ONCE, to load in the code from disk every time it gets paged in.
Just because they're writable in kernel mode while exec*(2) is running doesn't mean that they must be writable in user mode.
But you don't have to execute data or write to a code segment to crash a machine
First of all, the worst that could happen is that the process would core dump. The kernel is of course insulated from such sillinesses. That's why you have page tables and access control.
Second of all, it sure seems better that a program should crash than that some nastiness comes insinuating itself into unwanted places, executing arbitrary code (that's the bad one), or any number of other undesirable things.
Still, I really don't understand why this hasn't been done. It seems so obvious. There must be something important that the dangerously high blood levels in my caffeine stream are occluding.
It seems to me that if we went back to a sane system in which DATA and STACK pages were never executable -- just readable and writable -- and TEXT pages were never writable -- just readable and executable -- that a lot of these problems would mysteriously evaporate. Oh, I can see how you could write incorrect data on the stack in a frame you shouldn't be doing that to (a caller's frame data), but at least you could never write code that would actually be executed. This would to my eye seem to raise the bar at the security gate to a non-trivially higher notch.
Have you ever tried to "overwrite" a short string in Perl with a larger one? It auto-allocates. If you start adding C extension modules to Perl, well, then yes, you've opened up a hole, but that's hardly Perl's fault. The pure Perl modules you write should be fine. We did an extensive Purify etc bug-check on Perl quite some time ago.
Not to be a wet blanket, but it seems to me that there is no definitive difference between 700 IT users and 700 computer users, the former just being a fancy word for the latter.
Remember that "IT professional" and "IT user" are just fancy names for secretaries, librarians, and other paper pushers grabbing up fancy titles for low-brow work. Programmers know what they are: they're coding artisans.
Once upon a time, the Great Manager deemed a notoriously slow program so important that he would set three of his top staff members to work on it.
The first employee, a computer engineer, noted that there were too many bad blocks on the disk plus dodgy memory with parity errors, so swapped out the hardw are. And there was some rejoicing.
The second employee, a computer scientist, noted that the algorithm was quartic, and reduced it to one that was merely quadratic. And there was much rejoicing.
The third employee, an in-fo-may-shun pro-fesh-un-null, went down to Radio Shack to find out whether the Great Satan had issued a Win95 Resource Kit he could buy. And there was much invoicing.
No, it's Greek in which it means same, which is what's going on in "homogeneous". In Latin, homo means [the race of] Man, as in Homo sapiens. This is entirely different from words like "homozygous", which are of Greek extraction.
This has been explained too often already so I won't bother.
Here is the abbreviated form of what the OED says about "virus":
Etymology: a. L. virus slimy liquid, poison, offensive odour or taste. Hence also Fr., Sp., Pg. virus.
1 Venom, such as is emitted by a poisonous animal. Also fig.
2 Path. a A morbid principle or poisonous substance produced in the body as the result of some disease, esp. one capable of being introduced into other persons or animals by inoculations or otherwise and of developing the same disease in them. Now superseded by the next sense.
b Pl. viruses. An infectious organism that is usu. submicroscopic, can multiply only inside certain living host cells (in many cases causing disease) and is now understood to be a non-cellular structure lacking any intrinsic metabolism and usually comprising a DNA or RNA core inside a protein coat (see also quot. 1977). [ Formerly referred to as filterable viruses, their first distinguishing characteristic being the ability to pass through filters that retained bacteria. ]
c colloq. A virus infection.
3 fig. A moral or intellectual poison, or poisonous influence. Also in weakened use, an infectious fear, anxiety, etc.
4 Violent animosity; virulence.
5 attrib. and Comb., as (sense 2 b) virus disease, infection, particle; virus-carried, -containing, -free, -induced, -infected, -like adjs.; virus pneumonia, pneumonia caused by a virus rather than a bacterium.
Notice that the OED lists the plural as "viruses". Not "viri". Not "virii". Just "viruses". Latin had quite a variety of different words that ended in "-us". Only some of these (2nd declension nouns) form plurals using an "-us" => "-i" rule. Several other prominent patterns occur as well, including as the 3rd declension neuters (e.g. genus, corpus, opus) and the 4th declension nouns (e.g. abacus, status, apparatus).
Fortunately, we're not speaking Latin, we're speaking English. But even if we were, I have never heard of a "-us" => "-ii" rule, be it in Latin, Greek, or in English, nor can I discover any exemplars in which this alleged rule is active. Until such time as you prove otherwise, I shall continue to consider "virii" nothing more than a perverse, analphabetic corruption.
In reality until software is developed which can detect and respond to software threats autonomously people will always be susceptible to the whims of worm and virii coders. You can minimize the risk somewhat by using a robust OS or a non-mainstream OS. Once that OS becomes mainstream you've lost the 'protection'.
The only flawed argument here is your own. It is not popularity which determines vulnerability. It is the robustness of the underlying design of the system. Microsoft doesn't have viruses because it is popular. Microsoft has viruses because it was created by an idiot who would flunk if this were turned in for a grade at an operating systems design course.
Here's an example: if you make it illegal for user code to access page table hardware, you need never worry about this form of attack. This is so incredibly superior to various techniques to scan for code that does this in advance or detects its effects after the fact, that there can be no question of efficacy.
The proper entity to be sued for these violation is Microsoft. Yes, you heard me, sue Microsoft for viruses. If you had a car that blew up if you put the ignition key in the wrong way, you'd sue the manufacturer. The source of these viruses is Microsoft. They carry the full burden of responsibility for creating an operating system only a drooling cretin could love, and which even a script kiddie can break into. They've sold you a car not merely without seatbelts, but one without brakes, a speedometer, mirrors, or a transparent windshield.
PS: *virii is a script-kiddie's nonword. The plural of virus is viruses.
``In short, just as the Multics mentality of careful access controls shows up throughout Unix, the cretinous CP/M mentality of uncontrolled havoc shows up in DOS and all its mutant children.'' --tchrist
I'll preface this by saying that I strongly agree with the original article. It's a meme I've been spreading for years, and it's nice to see it show up in such as prominent place as the front page of the NY Times.
I can tell that this 34% is going to get a very strong slam here today, so instead, let's actually look at the *REAL* solutions:
I'm not sure what "a strong slam" might mean.
Teach users that opening an attachment on an insecure OS is asking for trouble, and should never be done unless the source is absolutely trustworthy... which leads to...
I can't believe that people actually run arbitrary code that they can't even look at the source code. What are they thinking?
Using PGP/GPG or other secure identification methods to be able to trust the validity of the mail. Just because it's from a co-worker doesn't necessarily mean it's legit. (These two stand out only because the latest big virii have been email ones, not that this is the only route)...
First of all, there's just no way that people are going to only accept mail from folks who give it an electronic signature. There's just too much going around to expect that. Second of all, you mean "viruses". "Virii" is not a word. Details available upon request.
Make sure all installations that require it have a quality and up-to-date virus program.
This is completely the wrong way to do it. Think about devising a networking ack/nak protocol, operating system scheduling algorithm, or database commit protocol. In all such cases, merely reducing the occurrence rate of the problem to a smaller, finite chance is utterly unacceptable. These is right and there is wrong. There is not 30% less likely. That's still wrong. The only correct way is to verify to 100% probability that a virus cannot infiltrate your entire system.
Your approach is the one used for a long time by those without an operating system. It is demonstrably insufficient. By way of contrast, the "make it impossible" solution employed by Unix has had markedly improved success.
Have the sysadmin be diligent about reading the various virii advisory lists and visiting the web sites of the makers of the virii programs on a daily basis. I've yet to see any major virii come out (at least in the states) and not have a virus eliminator or such within a 24hr day.
Now you're just shutting the barn door after the horses have escaped. This is not a viable approach. It requires constant diligence and luck. You can't expect these things.
Um, backup frequently and often. A virus may just eventually get through, but a virii can't do damage to tape backup, only possibly reside
This is good advice, but hardly insufficient. How do you know your backups were clean? You don't.
If you do not approve of the newspaper article's wise advice to diversify your hardware and software platforms, then the remaining simple solution to these insane virus problems is merely to install an operating system. One has but to compare the orders of magnitude of viruses for Microsoft systems compared with those for Unix systems to see the difference. How many Unix viruses are there? Since the RTMjr worm of 1988, which affected Suns and Vaxes only but left other hardware untouched, we haven't seen much.
My organization runs predominantly on three different chipsets (sparc, intel, power pc). Code that runs on one will not blindly run on the other. Moreover, there are several different operating systems installed on each chipset. This helps even more. But best of all, these actually provide real operating systems to get intercede between the program and the hardware.
Telling people not to read mail as root is one thing, but more important to make the mail reading procedure 100% secure against problems, and to make the operating system secure against user issues. Anything else is a joke doomed to fail, just like all the toy systems that have fallen prey to random attacks.
Number of viruses which I or people in my organization have been affected by in the last fifteen years: ZERO.
Oh good. I'm so very glad you've finally figured that out.
What we were debating was whether Perl is "interpreted" or "compiled."
Perl is always compiled. And just like all programs, Perl is always interpreted. It's just that sometimes the interpreter is your firmware.
In the likely case that your memory is as defective as the rest of your cognitive aperati
At least mine are sufficiently functional as to be able to discern the various declensions of Latin nouns. Yours, equally clearly, are not.
You see, there has never existed a word *aperati as you wrote it, nor even the more plausible but still absolutely wrong *apparati. That's because apparatus (note please the proper spelling, which you hopelessly mangled) is a fourth declension noun, along with prospectus, hiatus, status, nexus, and plexus. Fourth declension nouns never take -us => -i the way second declension nouns do, such as abacus, bacillus, incubus, and phallus. These also inflect differently than do the notorious third declension neuters, such as opus, genus, and corpus. This is also unlike words like ignoramus and mandamus, which are of course not even nouns in Latin, but rather verbs of the first conjugation that have been inflected in the first person plural of the present indicative.
Permit me to blunt rather than erudite. You're clearly reaching far beyond yourself here, and it's painful for the rest of us to watch you flounder in uncharted waters. I strongly suggest that you should restrict yourself to simple English plurals (-s or -es) until you manage to procure a bit of higher education. A suggested reading list is available upon request.
Perl is interpreted. You haven't really refuted that.
Why should I bother? It's still faster than your beloved Java, even without converting to C code.:-)
Very well. I'll repeat myself now for the logic-impaired, whom I am apparently addressing.
Perl code is always compiled -- so are most programming languages, including Java and Awk.
Perl code is always interpreted, just like all programming languages, including Java and C++.
Sometimes the PP interpreter is doing that interpretation.
Sometimes your firmware is doing that interpretation.
I suppose other possibilities could arise, but at this point, it would seem the wiser course not to overwhelm you with too many possibilities. Otherwise, I fear a return to your putative Heisencompilers.
I can think of plenty of words on my own much more easily than I could stick somebody else's words into my prose.
You are sooooooo cool; when's your guest spot of Friends?
From what I have gathered by reading between the lines and listening to the busboys at local college restaurants, I surmise that you must be alluding to some sort of serial television program. If that is the case, then I have a spot of bad news for you. Your pop-culture (can you say `oxymoron'?) references are completely lost on me, and so I cannot begin to imagine your implied meaning. I do not do television, nor have I since Sesame Street was the preferred program for members of my erstwhile age group. Instead, I pursue a long-forgotten diversion called the reading of books.
Converting source code into bytecode is compiling. Period. It matters not what's going to be handling those bytecodes, be it a code generator or a bytecode interpreter. Go back to compiler class next time you think you know what you're talking about.
And for the record, I don't believe I even own a thesaurus. Of what use would it be? I can think of plenty of words on my own much more easily than I could stick somebody else's words into my prose.
I'll try to use some choice small words just for you, like these here of just one sound group each, from now on so that you will not fear to give some sign that you still have no clue what I said, as you have just now done.
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More importantly, when coercion is involved, all personal responsibility, all moral choice is removed. You cannot extoll the virtue of someone who adds publicly available code to an existing GPL codebase. There is no virtue invovled, for he had no choice in the matter. Without choice, there is no morality.
Contrast this with the individual who initially creates open source and gives it away to the world. `If you love something, set it free; if it returns to you...' comes to mind. If fixes and enhancements come back to him, then the author of those updates has himself made a moral decision. How much more precious a thing this is than the prisoner who did as he was coerced to do!
It is clear which man has made a moral choice, and which one has not. Coercion is fundamentally opposed to morality.
Of course, whether you consider that good or bad is up to you. Personally, I believe that a simple, sweeping, blanket `good' or `bad' label is oversimplifying a complex matter. Obviously both licences are doing something that their authors want them to do. But let's disabuse ourselves of this maliciously deceptive `free' thing right here and now. The word was redefined by the FSF to mean something no one but lawyers, pharisees, and related zealots would find intuitive. It's a mean trick.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Drop the word `free'. It's a lie. One can continue to repeat clever sophistries until the sun goes nova, and continue to be very clever, very punny, even technically correct in at least one particular circumstance. But one is still completely misleading to virtually all the world.
A few days I was asked by a regular person -- not even a script kiddie -- whether [random software] was `freeware, or just shareware'. See that? Here's a simple test. Go out and ask 20 teenagers whether free software (which they'll call freeware) ever costs anything, and you'll find that 100% of them say, `What, are you crazy?'
Recently, I witnessed a newcomer to the net asked an oldtimer about what possible licence was on a piece of software the latter had written. The sum total of the oldtimer's response was "Do whatever you'd like with it," which surprised the newcomer, who obviously wasn't used to truly free software (unlike the FSF's insidiously deceiptful notion of the same) But what a pleasant change! Where did that complete generosity disappear to?
Let's face it. We've lost this battle. We have to stop hurting our own goals by beating a dead horse. We must instead use a real word in the way that everyone understands it. Of course gratis and libre are lovely distinctions, pero por desgracia, ocurre que todo el mundo no entiende castellano. :-)
Instead of gratis, perhaps we should say cost-free. See how clean and simple, how unambiguous that word is?
Instead of libre, we might say something more like hackable; that's my own original preference, but it has its own attendant difficulties. Less charged alternatives include changeable or mutable or legible or open source or as source code or in some cases, perhaps unrestricted. Historically, we used freely redistributable as distinct from public domain, but that's a problem term because it has the `free' bug, and doesn't specify source code.
I may not be certain about what the right word is, but I'm completely certain what the wrong word is. The wrong word is `free'. Please, please, PLEASE drop these word-games that only cause everyone on the outside to get confused just so that those on the inside get to gloat about how much smarter they are than the rest of the word. It's long past time to face the fact that we've lost the battle for this word, and perhaps time to realize that it was always the wrong word right from the get-go.
Free software is great. Don't destroy it with restrictive licences.
You might as well say that Australians don't speak English, or that Mexicans don't speak Spanish. That argument evaporates when you confront the Aussie with Spanish or the Mexican with English. Spanish is non-English, and vice versa.
Likewise, if you try to tell joe-random hapless W2K victim that Linux isn't Unix, he'll either just laugh at you, or else get highly confused. To these Prisoners of Bill, Linux certainly is Unix in every meaningful sense. Linux and BSD are not non-Unix. CP/M, W2K, MacOS, and all the other abominations foisted off on consumers are non-Unix.
Why must we continue to be Pharisaic about all this? Call a spade a spade.
You shouldn't assume that everyone buys into the spamvert mentality. Not everyone is a prisoner of the American consumerist claptrap you're talking about, whether because of their geography or because they prefer something other than a lie-down-and-vege-out plug-in drug.
In short, we do not all live in a Brave New World of pervasive mind-control through spamverts, and those of us who have willfully absented ourselves from that particular horror shall not be dragged kicking and screaming into it. We'll kick the face of the spamverts. Mark my words.
And no, I'm not trying to stop people from making a living through honest commerce. It's the `oh boy let's torture the captive' thing I won't tolerate. It's like something out of A Clockwork Orange. I've written a bit more about adverts in my web diversity guidelines.Let's think about a piano. It's a rich and complex instrument that takes many years to master. Someone without experience on it is virtually useless. Compare this now with a wind-up music box. Obviously the music box is more convenient for beginners to use. So what? Just because there's a place for a music box doesn't mean that there isn't a place in this world for a piano. Which one is more powerful, more expressive?
Not everything should be optimized for use by complete idiots. The CLI is infinitely more powerful than any GUI I've ever seen, because it tolerates and encourages communication between programs in ways never dreamt of by their authors. The Unix command line provides the developer with a broad set of powerful but flexible features that the creative mind can use to produce a custom design uniquely crafted to the particular demands of the situation.
Go out and find someone who has been at this game for many years. Now just sit back and watch them at work. They have created out of base components their own IDE, possible with SUI or GUI components, but probably not. But I guarantee you that it will be one that suits their own tastes and aptitudes. Quietly observe them edit files, move them around, compile them, debug them, test them, etc. The entire development is integrated, like a top-of-the-line German sports car: functional, powerful, and elegant. You will be absolutely astonished at the speed and ease exhibited by the native speaker of Unix in his home territory.
As on a piano, the art and skill of a CLI virtuoso can only be seen to be believed. That is the path to mastery -- all these cobbled little GUIs are expensive toys designed to sell a flashy demo using cheap tricks, and being optimized for immediate but shallow understanding rather than enduring use, are but a dim palimpsest of real tools.
Those without creative minds and agile fingers are of course welcome to hurry up with my fries. And they'll probably use a GUI to take my order, too.
Just yesterday, I was asked by a regular person, not even a kid, whether [random software] was `freeware, or just shareware'. See that? Here's a simple test. Go out and ask 20 teenagers whether free software (which they'll call freeware) ever costs anything, and you'll find that 100% of them say, `What, are you crazy?'
Let's face it. We've lost this battle. We have to stop hurting our own goals by beating a dead horse. We must instead use a real word in the way that everyone understands it. Of course gratis and libre are lovely distinctions, pero por desgracia, ocurre que todo el mundo no entiende castellano. :-)
Instead of gratis, perhaps we should say cost-free. See how clean and simple, how unambiguous that word is?
Instead of libre, we might say something more like hackable; that's my own original preference, but it has its own attendant difficulties. Less charged alternatives include changeable or mutable or legible or open source or as source code or in some cases, perhaps unrestricted. Historically, we used freely redistributable as distinct from public domain, but that's a problem term because it has the `free' bug, and doesn't specify source code.
I may not be certain about what the right word is, but I'm completely certain what the wrong word is. The wrong word is `free'. Please, please, PLEASE drop these teen-age word-games that only cause everyone on the outside to get confused just so that those on the inside get to gloat about how much smarter they are than the rest of the word. It's long past time to face the fact that we've lost the battle for this word, and perhaps time to realize that it was always the wrong word right from the get-go.
Because they like to screw with people's minds. "Free" quite simply means gratis in virtually everyone's minds, and everyone knows this. The word you want for libre is "hackable". Until they figure this out, they'll continue to hurt themselves.
Don't forget cscope.
Here's some bugtraq discussion on removing the execute bits from the stack. A nicer reference in some senses is this fine paper describing a lot of technical details.
I cannot believe that the disadvantages of selecting an alternate implementation would be greater than the advantages of not letting anybody splat their own code in a perfectly running program and have it execute that user code.
Self-modifying code may be nice for Core Wars, but it sucks for security verification.
Second of all, it sure seems better that a program should crash than that some nastiness comes insinuating itself into unwanted places, executing arbitrary code (that's the bad one), or any number of other undesirable things.
Still, I really don't understand why this hasn't been done. It seems so obvious. There must be something important that the dangerously high blood levels in my caffeine stream are occluding.
It seems to me that if we went back to a sane system in which DATA and STACK pages were never executable -- just readable and writable -- and TEXT pages were never writable -- just readable and executable -- that a lot of these problems would mysteriously evaporate. Oh, I can see how you could write incorrect data on the stack in a frame you shouldn't be doing that to (a caller's frame data), but at least you could never write code that would actually be executed. This would to my eye seem to raise the bar at the security gate to a non-trivially higher notch.
Once upon a time, the Great Manager deemed a notoriously slow program so important that he would set three of his top staff members to work on it.
The first employee, a computer engineer, noted that there were too many bad blocks on the disk plus dodgy memory with parity errors, so swapped out the hardw are. And there was some rejoicing.
The second employee, a computer scientist, noted that the algorithm was quartic, and reduced it to one that was merely quadratic. And there was much rejoicing.
The third employee, an in-fo-may-shun pro-fesh-un-null, went down to Radio Shack to find out whether the Great Satan had issued a Win95 Resource Kit he could buy. And there was much invoicing.
No, it's Greek in which it means same, which is what's going on in "homogeneous". In Latin, homo means [the race of] Man, as in Homo sapiens. This is entirely different from words like "homozygous", which are of Greek extraction.
American Standard Code for Information Interchange. What a concept. :-)
Fortunately, we're not speaking Latin, we're speaking English. But even if we were, I have never heard of a "-us" => "-ii" rule, be it in Latin, Greek, or in English, nor can I discover any exemplars in which this alleged rule is active. Until such time as you prove otherwise, I shall continue to consider "virii" nothing more than a perverse, analphabetic corruption.
Here's an example: if you make it illegal for user code to access page table hardware, you need never worry about this form of attack. This is so incredibly superior to various techniques to scan for code that does this in advance or detects its effects after the fact, that there can be no question of efficacy.
The proper entity to be sued for these violation is Microsoft. Yes, you heard me, sue Microsoft for viruses. If you had a car that blew up if you put the ignition key in the wrong way, you'd sue the manufacturer. The source of these viruses is Microsoft. They carry the full burden of responsibility for creating an operating system only a drooling cretin could love, and which even a script kiddie can break into. They've sold you a car not merely without seatbelts, but one without brakes, a speedometer, mirrors, or a transparent windshield.
PS: *virii is a script-kiddie's nonword. The plural of virus is viruses.
Your approach is the one used for a long time by those without an operating system. It is demonstrably insufficient. By way of contrast, the "make it impossible" solution employed by Unix has had markedly improved success.
Now you're just shutting the barn door after the horses have escaped. This is not a viable approach. It requires constant diligence and luck. You can't expect these things. This is good advice, but hardly insufficient. How do you know your backups were clean? You don't.If you do not approve of the newspaper article's wise advice to diversify your hardware and software platforms, then the remaining simple solution to these insane virus problems is merely to install an operating system. One has but to compare the orders of magnitude of viruses for Microsoft systems compared with those for Unix systems to see the difference. How many Unix viruses are there? Since the RTMjr worm of 1988, which affected Suns and Vaxes only but left other hardware untouched, we haven't seen much.
My organization runs predominantly on three different chipsets (sparc, intel, power pc). Code that runs on one will not blindly run on the other. Moreover, there are several different operating systems installed on each chipset. This helps even more. But best of all, these actually provide real operating systems to get intercede between the program and the hardware.
Telling people not to read mail as root is one thing, but more important to make the mail reading procedure 100% secure against problems, and to make the operating system secure against user issues. Anything else is a joke doomed to fail, just like all the toy systems that have fallen prey to random attacks.
Number of viruses which I or people in my organization have been affected by in the last fifteen years: ZERO.
Beat those odds, Wintel.
You see, there has never existed a word *aperati as you wrote it, nor even the more plausible but still absolutely wrong *apparati. That's because apparatus (note please the proper spelling, which you hopelessly mangled) is a fourth declension noun, along with prospectus, hiatus, status, nexus, and plexus. Fourth declension nouns never take -us => -i the way second declension nouns do, such as abacus, bacillus, incubus, and phallus. These also inflect differently than do the notorious third declension neuters, such as opus, genus, and corpus. This is also unlike words like ignoramus and mandamus, which are of course not even nouns in Latin, but rather verbs of the first conjugation that have been inflected in the first person plural of the present indicative.
Permit me to blunt rather than erudite. You're clearly reaching far beyond yourself here, and it's painful for the rest of us to watch you flounder in uncharted waters. I strongly suggest that you should restrict yourself to simple English plurals (-s or -es) until you manage to procure a bit of higher education. A suggested reading list is available upon request.
Why should I bother? It's still faster than your beloved Java, even without converting to C code.Very well. I'll repeat myself now for the logic-impaired, whom I am apparently addressing.
- Perl code is always compiled -- so are most programming languages, including Java and Awk.
- Perl code is always interpreted, just like all programming languages, including Java and C++.
- Sometimes the PP interpreter is doing that interpretation.
- Sometimes your firmware is doing that interpretation.
I suppose other possibilities could arise, but at this point, it would seem the wiser course not to overwhelm you with too many possibilities. Otherwise, I fear a return to your putative Heisencompilers. From what I have gathered by reading between the lines and listening to the busboys at local college restaurants, I surmise that you must be alluding to some sort of serial television program. If that is the case, then I have a spot of bad news for you. Your pop-culture (can you say `oxymoron'?) references are completely lost on me, and so I cannot begin to imagine your implied meaning. I do not do television, nor have I since Sesame Street was the preferred program for members of my erstwhile age group. Instead, I pursue a long-forgotten diversion called the reading of books.You might try it some time.
Debían is in the past imperfect (incomplete) tense. I wonder whether this has any deeper significance. :-)
And for the record, I don't believe I even own a thesaurus. Of what use would it be? I can think of plenty of words on my own much more easily than I could stick somebody else's words into my prose.
I'll try to use some choice small words just for you, like these here of just one sound group each, from now on so that you will not fear to give some sign that you still have no clue what I said, as you have just now done.