If person sees link to some interesting article, clicks on it, and comes to clueless home page, full of advertisments, he/she becomes very angry with this site and probably would never click on links pointing to this site again, thinking "Arghh, it is that bullshit site which shows me their ads instead of what I want to read"
Moreover, these people would become angry with site which do provide incorrect link too.
This is even an issue with news sites where news tends to go away from first page after a while.
Probably they don't know. I recieve a lot of spam on Chinese and Korean, although I don't read these languages. Thankfully, it is just easy to tell spamassassin that I never expect legitimate message with any CJK charset
Do you think that people whose PCs are infected by trojans are innocent victims of spammers?
No, I'd disagree. They are actively helping them by their ignorance.
If people who send out macroviruses are to pay fines, they would quickly learn how to use few checkboxes in their mail client.
Of course, if ingnorant users are fined, software publishers who sell mail clients "designed to allow virus propagation", operating systems with no access rights support and word processors which are able to incorporate viruses into documents, should be treated as drug dealers.
Severety of Russian laws was always compensated by lack of obligation to follow them.
There are laws, and there are operating instructions. They may contradict, but you'll have lot of problems if you would appeal to law.
There always is something which they can incriminate cellular operator, such as some tax miscalculations, and thus withdraw license and push him out of business, if he wouldn't cooperate with FSB.
So, SORM-1 (System for operative and searching actions) in cellular networks exists and operate. FSB may call cellular operator anytime and ask for cooperation.
Internet community in Russia is more concerned about privacy and human rights, so SORM-2 (simular system in internet) recieve much more attention from press. look at http://www.libertarium.ru/libertarium/sorm if you can read Russian.
I'm sitting just now in my office in the center of Moscow, and my phone doesn't display "No encryption" alert. It was so during Nord-Ost musicle hijacking, but not now.
BTW, it is not very comforting to think that somebody in the same bus with you might carry 2 kilo TNT bomb, which would explode when somebody send SMS to it.
Latest bomb in Moscow was apparently done via some remotely controlled ignition and explode when they tried deactivate it.
There already was a trial in Holland, when Russian author of parody to Harry Potter (there are two series of parody to Harry Potter written in Russia now) attempted to publish Holland translation of his book. And he lost.
But I know other authors which do not object against fan translations. For instanse L.M.Bujold greatly appreciates her fans and doesn't ask them to remove their translations (much better than officially published ones) from their sites.
Problem is that Harry Potter is not a literature. It is mass-media industry and most of its value is done from marketing hype, not from quality of a book.
Of course, Rowling does object free ride on her costly advertising campaign and even free publications. Authors which value their works more than their money do not.
IP rights don't last forever. Someday in the future Tolkien works would go into the public domain and anybody would be able to publish them on any language. I think that should happen in 2023.
BTW, I don't think that it is royalty problem. It looks much more like underestemated sales problem.
Things are even worse. When we are talking about Linux on desktops, we should talk about home users exclusively. And only about persons without families.
Desktop computers must die.
In any other environments be it office, or large family house, just turn off hard drivers and memory except barely neccessary to run X server from all computers except one.
With 100Mbit or even gigabit network you can replace hordes of desktops with X-terminals, which requires almost no maintainance, are dirt cheap (if you paid more than $100 for X termianl system block, somebody cheated you), and are completely replacable. No user grief about loss of data if one of terminals went out in smoke.
When we are talking about multiuser hosts, which serves dozens of X-terminals, all advantages of Debian multiplies
Why care so much about Joe User? Let RedHat, ALT Linux and other commercial firms care about them. They would get their revenues and give their contribution to OpenSource world, including Debian.
Users switch to Debian not from Windows (or complete computer illiteracy), but rather from other Linux distro's.
Personally I switched to Debian from RH (four or five years ago) when I found out, that when I need some piece of software which is not included in my distro, I routinely go to ftp.debian.org and grab orig.tar.gz from there.
There should be at least one distro in the world, which cares about clever people, not stupid ones.
Debian perfectly fill that niche. It is created by clever people and targetted to clever people.
With apt-get dist-upgrade who need installer at all, once he learned how dump/restore work? And for first time in the life you better to call some more experiencd friend.
Oh, this was about losing taxpayers (your) money, not about losing lives of volonteers?
Then I have to ask you another question:
What is better - to lose few billions and several lives to demonstrate technology superiority in the space or losing thousands of lives and much more money in assaults in Iraque and Afganistan?
There is a big difference between operations which could kill volonteers, who willingly take risk and operations which could affect live condition of unaware people.
How many people dies doing yachting or mountain climbing? Much more than seven in ten years.
But nobody going to disallow people to climb mountains or go into sea in 5-meter vessels.
It is their own lives and their own decision.
Same for astronauts. They have known that there is about 2% chances of death incident, and they take the risk. More glory to them.
Of course there are seaworthness check done on yachts. And NASA as well do their best to make sure that shuttle would land safely. Just forces of nature are sometimes more powerful than men.
Why the heck should they do anything from abstract altruism? They have enough shareholders to care of. And they do their job well (too well in eyes of DOJ). Microsoft is just a company which is out for profit, and it satisfies their customers better then any other company around.
They don't play fair with competitors, and this is only point to blame them.
Technically, their programmers do quite a good job by making software which works at all, given such uglu and self-contradictory specifications (probably written by somebody in marketing department, who just compilied thousends feature request from lusers).
It is lusers, which are not inclined to learn, who are responsible for hell which happens now in software industry and internet.
Only thing which Microsoft can be blamed for is that they made computers accessible not only for people who are willing to learn, but for average persons. Would you blame them for this?
Now they are moving toward people who are able to learn, giving them something to learn about there from. While there are about hundred lusers per one power user, not mention hacker, they wouldn't loose their profit, but may make life for us a bit happier, allows us to interoperate with their users without resorting to their "fool-friendly" and "clever-person-unfriendly" tools.
You don't run Emacs as root? And what do you use to edit config files in this case? Or you have some clever script which does chown you $1 su you -c "emacs $1" chown root $1
One of reasons I prefer vim to emacs is that I can edit configs in my favorite editor and don't have too much byte-compilied lisp running as root while doing so.
I would tend to believe that someone who is stupid enough to write on WordBasic for self-expression (and what other purpose such viruses have), doesn't probably know enough of hex editors to falsificate GUID.
And why care about some ID number while you are willingfully sending out big chunks of arbitrary information from your computer with word file (which can contain your dialup password, private mail and even secring.pgp), waiting only for someone with LAOLA to investigate it.
I have recieved reports from catdoc users, that they was able to read future plans of their bosses, which wasn't intended to be sent just now.
Imagine surprise of boss when emploee begin to discuss with him plans, which weren't even send (in boss opinion)
just think that the "executable" part of documents should be about document contained data
Note, that in Safe-Tcl it is even prohibited by default to create toplevel windows. It is very annoyng to see advertisement windows pop up on your screen when you browse certain site.
Of course, writing to arbitrary files is prohibited to, and reading user files is allowed if and only if no socket operation is allowed.
This is a bit restrictive, but sensible security model. And Java and Javascript are plain security hole, smaller that Active-X or Word docs, but big enough for me, to keep both of them disabled in my Netscape.
So, author of this feature said that OSS would never conquer desktop market, just becouse writing user friendly program is too boring and gives too few aestetic pleasure to author.
This is true with already available programming techniques, like Motif, Qt or even FLTK.
But this is not so true with Tcl/Tk or SmallTalk. When language and basic concepts supports GUI programming, writing friently code is no more boring than writing efficient code and gives no less aestetic pleasure.
Only one problem remains - invent metaphora of GUI, with would be as powerful and simple as shell metaphoras (IO redirection and regexp) in CLI.
Once it is done, writing his own GUI would be available for average user and OSS GUI would prosper.
There is already too much people who claims to be Linux programmers, but just try to turn Linux into just a bit more stable Windows or DOS.
I see questions "How I bypass system and access video directly" every day in comp.os.linux.development.apps.
So goes for KDE which not yet have builtin scripting language and ties programmer to ONE language, which some people thinks better in the world, but many other (including myself) think as good only for limited niche, and this niche doesn't include GUI. GUI is to be written on Tcl/Tk, Python, Guile, but not C/C++, as well as computation routines are not to be written on bash.
I don't even mention numerous incompatible programs which fail to compile even on BSDI, not mention Sparc (either Linux or Solaris)
Let alone character-graphic toolkits, which don't work even on good telnet clients, not mention hardware vt220, or audio programs which try to access/dev/dsp directly, assuming that they have user on the same machine as they run, instead of looking to DISPLAY variable and using netaudio.
These windows programmers do not understand five things
1. There can be another CPU aside Intel 2. There can be other users on machine aside one running their program 3. Nothing requires user run program on the machine he is sitting at, 4. forking is simplier and more errorproof than multithreading. 5. There is UNIX toolbox phylosophy and they are expected to give users ability to combine their program with other ones, user is already familiar with.
If only this thing have good video card and ethernet, I could hide it inside case of my monitor and have an X-terminal. Just plug mouse and keyboard into monitor and attach it to your server with ethernet cable and you have one more workplace. 16Mb 486 is quite enough for X-terminal, I'm currently have one with 12.
And lot of desk space saved.
Hide another one inside printer and you have print-server. Yet another in external modem to serve as router.
Voila - no more hell of cables -all the perepherials are connected directly to your local net. (Including scanners with sane-net)
Of course $419 is too much for thing to be embedded into each and every piece of hardware. But, I hope that if this thing would be produced in millions, it would be comparable to match box in price too.
>This is just the reason why we need solid and unrestricted encryption software...
There was MD5 sum for this package and there was detached PGP signature.
But how often you care to check signatures when you are downloading a package. And it seems that anything at all can contain trojans.
Read a nice article by Ken Thompson about trojan in C compilier. Have you checked MD5 sum when you downloaded GCC binary last time? And as Thompson shows, recompiling GCC from sources with untrusted compilier doesn't help you.
See: apache - is written on C Emacs - written on Lisp (so its way for OO programs) Linux kernel - written on C Gimp - written on C. Perl - written on C Tcl - written on C
So, where are good programs written on C++? Nothing to name except KDE. But there is a lot of problems with it. Is there web-servers war? No - anyone prefer to contribute to apache. But there is Desktop war, becouse too much people don't like either Qt or C++ at all and starting altertaitve desktop projects.
Consider number of programmers who would be able to peer review and contribute to your code. If you write in C every C _and_ C++ programmer counts. If you write in C++, there are a lot of people (and, more imprtant, compiliers) who wouldn't understand what are you trying to say.
Slashdot Mirror
Just becouse.
If person sees link to some interesting article,
clicks on it, and comes to clueless home page,
full of advertisments, he/she becomes very angry
with this site and probably would never click on
links pointing to this site again, thinking
"Arghh, it is that bullshit site which shows me
their ads instead of what I want to read"
Moreover, these people would become angry with site which do provide incorrect link too.
This is even an issue with news sites where news
tends to go away from first page after a while.
Problem is not to patent idea from sci-fi book,
but to prevent implementor to patent the idea becouse it was widely published before.
Patents suuuck!
It's easy - money should go to addressee
of message.
During normal communication there are
approximately same amount of letter in
each direction, so it would be zero total.
If you subscribe to mailing list, you
pay subscription fee, which would
be returned to you eventually with messages from the list.
But if you are sending spam,
you are paying people to read it.
If it wouldn't stop spam, it would
at least make it more bearable.
Probably they don't know.
I recieve a lot of spam on Chinese
and Korean, although I don't read these
languages. Thankfully, it is just
easy to tell spamassassin that I never
expect legitimate message with
any CJK charset
Do you think that people whose PCs are
infected by trojans are innocent victims
of spammers?
No, I'd disagree. They are actively helping them by their ignorance.
If people who send out macroviruses
are to pay fines, they would quickly
learn how to use few checkboxes in their
mail client.
Of course, if ingnorant users are fined, software publishers who sell
mail clients "designed to allow virus
propagation", operating systems with
no access rights support and word
processors which are able to incorporate viruses into documents,
should be treated as drug dealers.
Severety of Russian laws was always compensated
by lack of obligation to follow them.
There are laws, and there are operating instructions. They may contradict, but you'll have
lot of problems if you would appeal to law.
There always is something which they can incriminate
cellular operator, such as some tax miscalculations,
and thus withdraw license and push him out of business, if he wouldn't cooperate with FSB.
So, SORM-1 (System for operative and searching actions) in cellular networks exists and operate.
FSB may call cellular operator anytime and ask for cooperation.
Internet community in Russia is more concerned
about privacy and human rights, so SORM-2 (simular system in internet) recieve much more attention
from press. look at http://www.libertarium.ru/libertarium/sorm if you can read Russian.
I'm sitting just now in my office in the center
of Moscow, and my phone doesn't display "No encryption" alert. It was so during Nord-Ost musicle hijacking, but not now.
BTW, it is not very comforting to think that
somebody in the same bus with you might carry
2 kilo TNT bomb, which would explode when somebody
send SMS to it.
Latest bomb in Moscow was apparently done
via some remotely controlled ignition and
explode when they tried deactivate it.
There already was a trial in Holland, when
Russian author of parody to Harry Potter
(there are two series of parody to Harry Potter
written in Russia now) attempted to publish
Holland translation of his book. And he lost.
But I know other authors which do not object
against fan translations. For instanse L.M.Bujold
greatly appreciates her fans and doesn't ask them
to remove their translations (much better than
officially published ones) from their sites.
Problem is that Harry Potter is not a literature.
It is mass-media industry and most of its value
is done from marketing hype, not from quality of a
book.
Of course, Rowling does object free ride on her
costly advertising campaign and even free publications. Authors which value their works
more than their money do not.
IP rights don't last forever. Someday in the future
Tolkien works would go into the public domain
and anybody would be able to publish them on
any language. I think that should happen in 2023.
BTW, I don't think that it is royalty problem.
It looks much more like underestemated sales problem.
I don't know how it is in US, but here in Russia
I got very annoyed with people whose lights are
malfunctioning.
Let them study electrics to to keep their cars
in proper order.
It Does matter. What you get after
your hands-free installation? Average system
tuned for somebody else's preferences.
You'll need to hack around long time before
this system would suit your needs.
With debian you are getting what you want
just after install. Of course it involves some
time to explain apt what you really want.
You'll quicky get time, spent for installation
back due to efficiency of everyday work and
simplified upgrades.
Things are even worse. When we are talking
about Linux on desktops, we should talk about
home users exclusively. And only about persons
without families.
Desktop computers must die.
In any other environments be it office, or large
family house, just turn off hard drivers and
memory except barely neccessary to run X server
from all computers except one.
With 100Mbit or even gigabit network you can replace
hordes of desktops with X-terminals, which requires almost no maintainance, are dirt cheap
(if you paid more than $100 for X termianl system
block, somebody cheated you), and are completely
replacable. No user grief about loss of data
if one of terminals went out in smoke.
When we are talking about multiuser hosts,
which serves dozens of X-terminals, all advantages
of Debian multiplies
Why care so much about Joe User?
Let RedHat, ALT Linux and other commercial firms
care about them. They would get their revenues
and give their contribution to OpenSource world,
including Debian.
Users switch to Debian not from Windows (or complete
computer illiteracy), but rather from other Linux
distro's.
Personally I switched to Debian from RH (four or five years
ago) when I found out, that when I need some piece
of software which is not included in my distro,
I routinely go to ftp.debian.org and grab orig.tar.gz from there.
There should be at least one distro in the world,
which cares about clever people, not stupid ones.
Debian perfectly fill that niche. It is created
by clever people and targetted to clever people.
With apt-get dist-upgrade who need installer
at all, once he learned how dump/restore work?
And for first time in the life you better
to call some more experiencd friend.
Oh, this was about losing taxpayers (your) money,
not about losing lives of volonteers?
Then I have to ask you another question:
What is better - to lose few billions and several
lives to demonstrate technology superiority in the
space or losing thousands of lives and much more
money in assaults in Iraque and Afganistan?
There is a big difference between operations
which could kill volonteers, who willingly take
risk and operations which could affect live condition of unaware people.
How many people dies doing yachting or mountain
climbing? Much more than seven in ten years.
But nobody going to disallow people to climb mountains or go into sea in 5-meter vessels.
It is their own lives and their own decision.
Same for astronauts. They have known that there
is about 2% chances of death incident, and they
take the risk. More glory to them.
Of course there are seaworthness check done on
yachts. And NASA as well do their best to make
sure that shuttle would land safely. Just forces of nature are sometimes more powerful than men.
Why the heck should they do anything from abstract
altruism? They have enough shareholders to care
of.
And they do their job well (too well in eyes of DOJ). Microsoft is just a company which is
out for profit, and it satisfies their customers
better then any other company around.
They don't play fair with competitors, and this
is only point to blame them.
Technically, their programmers do quite a good
job by making software which works at all,
given such uglu and self-contradictory specifications (probably written by somebody
in marketing department, who just compilied
thousends feature request from lusers).
It is lusers, which are not inclined to learn, who are responsible for hell which happens now
in software industry and internet.
Only thing which Microsoft can be blamed for
is that they made computers accessible not only
for people who are willing to learn, but for
average persons. Would you blame them for this?
Now they are moving toward people who are able
to learn, giving them something to learn about there from. While there are about hundred lusers
per one power user, not mention hacker, they
wouldn't loose their profit, but may make life
for us a bit happier, allows us to interoperate
with their users without resorting to their
"fool-friendly" and "clever-person-unfriendly"
tools.
You don't run Emacs as root? And what do
you use to edit config files in this case?
Or you have some clever script
which does
chown you $1
su you -c "emacs $1"
chown root $1
One of reasons I prefer vim to emacs is that
I can edit configs in my favorite editor
and don't have too much byte-compilied lisp
running as root while doing so.
RTF once stood for Revisable text format
And how are you going to edit your PDFs?
I would tend to believe that someone who is
stupid enough to write on WordBasic for self-expression (and what other purpose such viruses have), doesn't probably know enough
of hex editors to falsificate GUID.
And why care about some ID number while you
are willingfully sending out big chunks of
arbitrary information from your computer with
word file (which can contain your dialup password,
private mail and even secring.pgp), waiting
only for someone with LAOLA to investigate it.
I have recieved reports from catdoc users, that
they was able to read future plans of their bosses, which wasn't intended to be sent just now.
Imagine surprise of boss when emploee begin to
discuss with him plans, which weren't even send
(in boss opinion)
Note, that in Safe-Tcl it is even prohibited by default to create toplevel windows. It is very annoyng to see advertisement windows pop up on your screen when you browse certain site.
Of course, writing to arbitrary files is prohibited to, and reading user files is allowed if and only if no socket operation is allowed.
This is a bit restrictive, but sensible security model. And Java and Javascript are plain security hole, smaller that Active-X or Word docs, but big enough for me, to keep both of them disabled in my Netscape.
So, author of this feature said that OSS would
never conquer desktop market, just becouse
writing user friendly program is too boring
and gives too few aestetic pleasure to author.
This is true with already available programming
techniques, like Motif, Qt or even FLTK.
But this is not so true with Tcl/Tk or SmallTalk.
When language and basic concepts supports GUI
programming, writing friently code is no more boring than writing efficient code and gives
no less aestetic pleasure.
Only one problem remains - invent metaphora of
GUI, with would be as powerful and simple
as shell metaphoras (IO redirection and regexp)
in CLI.
Once it is done, writing his own GUI would
be available for average user and OSS GUI
would prosper.
There is already too much people who claims to
/dev/dsp directly, assuming that they
be Linux programmers, but just try to turn
Linux into just a bit more stable Windows or DOS.
I see questions "How I bypass system and access
video directly" every day in comp.os.linux.development.apps.
So goes for KDE which not yet have builtin scripting language and ties programmer to ONE
language, which some people thinks better in
the world, but many other (including myself)
think as good only for limited niche, and this
niche doesn't include GUI. GUI is to be written
on Tcl/Tk, Python, Guile, but not C/C++, as well
as computation routines are not to be written
on bash.
I don't even mention numerous incompatible programs which fail to compile even on BSDI,
not mention Sparc (either Linux or Solaris)
Let alone character-graphic toolkits, which don't
work even on good telnet clients, not mention
hardware vt220, or audio programs which try to
access
have user on the same machine as they run, instead
of looking to DISPLAY variable and using netaudio.
These windows programmers do not understand five
things
1. There can be another CPU aside Intel
2. There can be other users on machine aside
one running their program
3. Nothing requires user run program on the
machine he is sitting at,
4. forking is simplier and more errorproof than
multithreading.
5. There is UNIX toolbox phylosophy and they
are expected to give users ability to combine
their program with other ones, user is already
familiar with.
If only this thing have good video card
and ethernet, I could hide it inside case
of my monitor and have an X-terminal.
Just plug mouse and keyboard into monitor
and attach it to your server with ethernet
cable and you have one more workplace.
16Mb 486 is quite enough for X-terminal,
I'm currently have one with 12.
And lot of desk space saved.
Hide another one inside printer and you have
print-server.
Yet another in external modem to serve as
router.
Voila - no more hell of cables -all the perepherials are connected directly to your local
net. (Including scanners with sane-net)
Of course $419 is too much for thing to be
embedded into each and every piece of hardware.
But, I hope that if this thing would be produced
in millions, it would be comparable to match box
in price too.
There was MD5 sum for this package and there was detached PGP signature.
But how often you care to check signatures when you are downloading a package. And it seems that anything at all can contain trojans.
Read a nice article by Ken Thompson about trojan in C compilier. Have you checked MD5 sum when you downloaded GCC binary last time? And as Thompson shows, recompiling GCC from sources with untrusted compilier doesn't help you.
See:
apache - is written on C
Emacs - written on Lisp (so its way for OO programs)
Linux kernel - written on C
Gimp - written on C.
Perl - written on C
Tcl - written on C
So, where are good programs written on C++?
Nothing to name except KDE. But there is a lot
of problems with it. Is there web-servers war?
No - anyone prefer to contribute to apache.
But there is Desktop war, becouse too much people
don't like either Qt or C++ at all and starting
altertaitve desktop projects.
Consider number of programmers who would be
able to peer review and contribute to your code.
If you write in C every C _and_ C++ programmer
counts. If you write in C++, there are a lot
of people (and, more imprtant, compiliers)
who wouldn't understand what are you trying to
say.