Actually, it does filter out worms, kinda. It recompiles the MIME message into multipart/mixed format, and renames attachments to remove fake file extensions. So to run a worm not only do you have to open an attachment but you have to open one that says "BABE.PIF" instead of "BABE.JPG.pif"
I did think about that. But I'm in no place to customize this for languages other than English. That would require Knowledge and Time, both of which I am short of. Plus, I'm following the good old Problem With Open Source #4521: Programming For The Self.
By "English characters" I mean ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ and the lowercase equivalents. If you want it to allow weird dutch characters, edit the source when it comes.
All the tests will be customizable and there will be name whitelists eventually. But that's a while off. You should note that it never deletes mail, it simply rewrites it with a different subject and recompiled MIME body.
It doesnt put a load on the server since it runs on your client. The engine could run on a server, of course, but I don't really think it warrants the term "engine", it's only a coupla hundred lines of code. It's pretty damn fast, except for the blacklist hunt described below, which is not noticeably slow, but would be when dealing with thousands of mails per minute.
It will do more tests in future on the body and headers, currently I theorised that I could spot most spam from the subject instantly, and then looked at what alerted me that it was spam.
I've added some more tests to it anyway, so now it can check for Bayesian hacking where there's loads of words and they're mostly longer than 3 characters, and also a rather nifty word decoder having read one poster on here who said there were several hundred million ways to spell "viagra". The decoder tries all possible variations on a curiously obfuscated word until it hits the blacklist (for example, V1a9ra -> V1agra -> Via9ra -> Viagra *bingo*).
Perhaps I should have made myself clear. And perhaps I should have thought a bit about that last section. When I say "block" I mean "ignore all RSTs from for a period of time". This will normally not cause a problem as RSTs are not critical.
As you can see, I'm backtracking having realised I made a really dumb suggestion. Anyway, the point I made above that still holds. Increase the sequence number size to 64 bit and problem solved (could possibly use that reserved field...) Anyway, before we increase the sequence number field to 64 bit perhaps we should think about doing it as-per-RFC where both ACK and SEQ numbers are checked on a RST. Most implementations DO NOT CHECK BOTH and this is what causes the flaw (as many have pointed out above me).
other TCP weaknesses are syn floods (not quite the same thing, but somewhat similar -- in fact, this vulnerability might as well be called a "RST flood"),
1. We know what the other TCP vulerabilities were. Anyone who's still susceptible to them is a lunatic.
2. This is not at all the same thing and in no way similar other than the fact "it uses TCP".
3. This vulnerability should not be called an RST flood. That would confuse it with a SYN flood which works totally differently and is much simpler. This should be called a broken window attack or something.
I wouldn't say TCP is broken
After noting all the other kinds of irrelevant TCP attack and reading up on this rather serious one, you wouldn't say it was broken? Could it be that, like everyone else including me, you never realised it was broken because you never looked close enough?
it would be tough to design a transport protocol that is still simple (and doesnt use CPU burning hashing/encryption techniques) that wouldn't have these sorts of vulnerabilities
It's called IPSEC, it's secure on the IP level up so TCP is encrypted over it. The simpler way to increase security would be to maintain current window size but increase the sequence number field to 64 bits wide. This would make it nigh-impossible to find where the window is sitting.
calling this vulnerability severe is like screaming that highways are fundamentally unsafe because someone could point their car the wrong way and start smashing into oncoming traffic
Highways are fundamentally unsafe. They're full of retarded people shunting 3 ton hunks of metal around at speeds they're not comfortable with. But your point is void because people would not do that as they'd die as a result and kill a lot of people. I don't think a kid doing a TCP RST attack really needs to be that dedicated, and this could cost businesses millions of dollars if they don't wise up to it sharpish. Most people who'd took even a short course in networking would be wise to it already.
The best defence against this? Simply check for a stream of RST packets. They dont come in huge bundles with incrementing sequence numbers often. Detect that signature, block IP, sorted.
Well, approximately 95% of my e-mail is spam. I hacked together a tool called POPgun that takes a real basic approach to spam checking. None of your Bayesian filters and all that nonsense. It sits transparently between my mail client (which connects to localhost) and my mail server, captures the mails as they come in and rewrites them.
It does eight (yes, eight) tests on the subjects of every message. I havent even added body checking yet, and it catches most spam. I even tried replacing these 8 tests with the SpamAssassin engine and found that it was less good at detecting spam mails. The tests are so simple:
Is The Subject Capitalized Like A Headline?
Does the subject contain too many non english-alphanumeric characters?
Is the subject a duplicate of another subject in the same POP retrieve job?
Does the subject contain 4 or more spaces anywhere?
Is the subject more THAN HALF CAPITAL LETTERS
Does the mail have no subject at all?
Does the su-bject con+tain obvi!ous obfuscation?
Finally, does the subject hit on the blacklisted words?
The blacklist is checked after first collapsing spaced-out words like "V I A G R A" and removing the above-mentioned obvious obfuscation. It's regex-based and contains the typical stuff like "meds" "medication" etc, but also a test for a subject that ends in 3 or more spaces followed by a string of random consonants.
When it detects SPAM, it simply changes the subject line to indicate that the message is spam.
In addition to spam-checking, it also removes all HTML mark-up (removes the tags leaving plaintext behind), deciphers MIMEd messages and recompiles them into multipart/mixed format (so images etc. are attachments) and renames many-extensioned attachments, so girl.jpg.pif becomes girl.pif.
It's still in dev, but it'll be available on baxpace.com in the next week or so for Win32 (as an exe) and UNIX platforms. It's written in Perl.
Is open up the GBA to home-brew developers. I am one of them, and I'm constantly annoyed by how Nintendo keeps me out of creating junk to run on their product that I paid for. I know all other consoles do this, but with such a simple little device, anyone can hack it and their sales of the thing would be even greater. Nintendo also lock out developers of games -- you have to go thru Nintendo and if you don't, you'll never sell anything. Independent developers cannot compete with Nintendo itself, and consequently the game market for the GBA is swamped with games costing $40 a whack that are usually not much more impressive than an old Sega Genesis game and don't appeal to me (I'm not into the whole faceless-anime-nonsense deal with characters and games that have no personality). It's very sad that such a sweet little machine is so closed up.
:) should have modded me troll, I was asking for it. It is interesting how Linux zealots can say the exact same thing about Linux being "better" than Win32, and that's never disputed by the Win32 crowd.
Linux does have terrible latency issues with sound, but OpenAL and ALSA have probably fixed that now. Linux also has an awful amount of different gfx APIs, because nobody can decide which is best, so OpenGL is still pretty much the standard sure-fire way of making sure the game will work. OpenGL is old now, and cobbled together with a ton of vendor-specific extensions making it nigh-impossible to ensure that the game will take advantage of the hardware features.
Currently, DirectX sets the *standards* for graphics card functionality. You can't get better support than that. Sorry.
You're all retarded. If you knew that this 96kb has:
1. Several texture generators
2. AI engine
3. 3D engine with collision detection, mesh animation, mesh generation from simple primitives...
4. Software music synthesizer as used in the Candytron and.das.produkt 64k demos
This is an extremely interesting production for its size. Just look at the textures. So it uses DX8, oh no. Go download the Heaven Seven demo if you want a software raytraced demo in 64kb. This is a game, not a demo.
Also, it won't run on Linux. Not everything has to run on Linux. This was made for windows. Windows has the best gaming and 3D support out there, Linux doesn't come close. If you wanted to play games, then why the hell do you run Linux? Linux is for work. And please don't cite a ton of games that have been ported to lux. The demoscene has always been for Windows/DOS only on the PC scene, since Windows is the best way to get the max out of gfx and audio hardware without compromising performance. It's just done better I'm afraid. I hope linux catches up someday, but the best way for it to do that would be to have MS port directx to it.
Jesus what good has Java ever done anyway. All it's used for is games on mobile phones these days. I remember getting really excited in the past when everyone said Java would be powering my toaster by 2000!!! Not. Java was nothing but an extremely strongly typed and anally strict scripting language. Java should compile into blisteringly fast native code, because of it's incredibly pedantic internals it's easy to optimize automatically. But of course, it doesnt. It sits running on a virtual machine. A virtual machine that was written in C++. Long live the Java revolution.
OK, so you can get a JIT compiler. Fab. Now things run only half as fast as competetive languages with a huge "HEAVEN FORBID, DONT TOUCH THE OS OR USE A NATIVE GUI" twist. Java disgusts me, it would have been a very good language but it lacks so much in terms of being realistic. People DO want to make OS calls and load up system shared objects and stuff. With Java, every time you start to code you're a million miles behind what's current for the architecture you're working on. When I was coding for java felt like using an Atari emulator, and ran about as fast.
For Java to succeed it needs to dominate the mobile market and take custom java chips (the virtual machine converted to a real machine) on board.
For the desktop computer, we'll all laugh at java and just use.NET, since that's the same thing but done correctly, supports several languages, compiles from bytecode to native machine code only once on the host OS and runs machine code versions of executables after that point, and is just what Java should have been. Sun are crappy, and have little to do with Silicon Graphics, Inc either (why are so many people associating Sun with SGI?). The only relationship is that they teamed up in 2001 so Sun could go "please save java, SGI!".
The only reason people want java saved is because it's all they can code in because it was forced down their throats at university. Java's a learning language for those who want to grasp the concepts of object orientation and want to get a kick in the face whenever they do anything a bit risky, which is good for Universities who want a language that's also sandboxed in a VM and cant do any damage. It sure sucks for doing anything in the real world.
I realised how much java blows when I had to download 90MB of JVM to run a 200kb program, and even after install the program didnt work..NET is a 20MB download, so it arrives faster, runs faster, and is just as portable. I can only thank Java and Sun for being so crappy that Microsoft had to come along and lay down some ass whoopings.
Programs written for J++ wouldn't compile under regular Sun Java. Therefore they had no real right to call it a "Java" compiler.
They didn't. They called it "J++", the ++ meaning "stuff added". They never claimed it was java, only that it was based on and backward compatible with java. You interpreted wrong. You are a Dumbass.
I think if all you look at is shitty-ass japanese naff-o-games like Metroid and junk, you're naturally going to see that all the women are as dreadfully faceless and dull as the men. Let's all play as the girl in that beat-em-up! She rocks because she's quick and has enormous breasts and weird coloured hair. Pitty she's piss-weak and hopeless.
Your cock-and-bull japanese filth games do not wash with me or anyone else with an iota of taste who'd rather play something with a plot and some decent dialogue.
If you want to see women in gaming done well why not look at the PC or Playstation scene where there's games like No One Lives Forever, Syberia, Broken Sword, and Prince of Persia: TSOT. All games that treat women with respect, don't give them whopping bosoms, stupid hair, enormous eyes or dumb squeaky voices that only ever say one word. Christ even since Wing Commander women have been portrayed brilliantly in gaming by western production companies. If you only analyze games from japan and china you're naturally going to see women treated as objects, now arent you?
With Microsoft applications only an idiot would need to look at the manual, but the manual is there to look at.
With Open Source / Free Software applications, the manual is usually a necessity for installing and operating the software correctly, but the manual does not exist.
Open Source did not evolve out of people complaining. It evolved out distributed development. One guy asking for help with his project and posting the source so other people could assist in the coding. I am not arguing against open source, I am arguing against software that does not also offer binaries for plain old users (which most do now, and some are even up to date)
* requires autoconf.
* requires filling your environment with nonsense in order to locate manpages, binaries, libs, etc
* useless with libraries because if you do this subsequent installations of other packages that depend on the first one are a real pain to configure.
is that compiling from source can sometimes even be slower executing depending on your compiler.
Also, better to install from packages because:
1. They WILL work
2. They install fast
3. They are easilly de-installed
4. They are painless
5. Dependencies are installed automatically sometimes, and other times packages are the only way to resolve a dependency loop
6. Most other OSes since the dawn of the home computer use pre-compiled binaries, and nobody has complained
7. It is surely the developers job to make sure it compiles properly and do all the compiler error headache solving
Packages are just so much nicer. A lot of the time, I can get pentium-optimised versions of the ones I want, and if I can't then 386 optimised versions are OK by me. The difference in speed one sees is pretty much only for the anally retentive, it is so minimal.
1. The Internet.
2. The Domain Name.
3. The e-mail Address.
4. Anything in an RFC.
This would mean that assholes could not come along and claim more patents on technology that is already patented by somebody else. When I say somebody nice, I mean someone who'll leave their patent to rot in the office and only ever get shirty when someone else tries to overpatent public knowledge.
But what does it matter? OpenOffice.org (which I've never seen a reason to use over MSO but am downloading now to give it a whirl) is free, no money is earned from it, so it's no skin off OOo's nose if it's adoption rate is low. I think that OOo probably just want to make a good product that 'nix users can use to do word processing and DTP, there is not much to pick between them other than price (OOo wins) and load times (MSO wins, even without suspicions of transparent quick start routines that certainly don't appear in my tasklist).
Bottom line is, nobody really cares if OOo dominates MSO or vice versa except the zealots. OOo is currently nothing but a holistic alternative for Windows users and a necessity for Unix users. Perhaps I should remember that/.'s readership consists mainly of zealots and I will probably be shafted for this post.
When email gets fixed (through authenticated access), the worms and virii will need to find a new way to spread
Or, indeed, an old way to spread. Before this newfangled e-mail nonsense virii had to spread through exploits and infect files. I hate to say this but that appending code to the end of executables and inserting jumps to the new viral code and back was clever in comparison to what we have now. Virii are interesting beasts, worms are just boring crud made by 14 year olds who learned Visual Basic at school. The time things started to give was about the time that the people who feel inclined to make virii suddenly realised that they didnt need to be clever and that people are so dumb that they'll pretty much run anything that comes into their inbox. "It can't do any damage, it's only a screensaver!" etc. So all the file-infecting virii have gone now, overtaken by the worms and the trojans.
I'd like to point out (in no relation to the post I replied to) that there seems to be a big "Windows is crappy!!" response to this story. Windows isn't crappy, it's users are crappy. And its users are crappy because most people are crappy, and windows is used by most people because it's easy to use (unlike Unix) and doesnt require you to spend over $2,000 in computer equipment (unlike Mac OS). It is, if you like, a compromise between those two great operating systems, taking the flexibility of one and the ease of use of the other and mishmashing them together at a low price tag. Everyone uses it because everyone can. Software's available and it works on everyone's computer. This is why everyone uses Windows, and while that's not necessarilly a good thing, it does mean that windows is the primary target for worms, just because so many people use Windows.
If you used Linux/Unix, that doesnt even HAVE file extensions for most things, so executables are not instantly recognisable as such. Running them by accident is so much easier. Shell scripts are even easier to run, Perl is a piece of cake to run. Just type./thefile and away it goes, or even double click it. Dangerous bad shit, that. At least with Windows you have some slight warning that the file might be bad stuff before you attempt to open it.
I didnt mean quite like that, plus it wasn't me who originally drew this comparison, I just paraphrased it from various media sources. What I was getting at is that the worms are evolving because Crappy But Popular Worm gets released, someone takes that code and improves it or modifies it, releases their own worm based on the old one, and then someone else gets that worm and modifies it, improves it, etc. and the process snowballs. Evolution. Not survival of the fittest but propagation of the sneakiest.
I like grub, but if I'm "Bob User" I should never be given the opportunity to bugger around with my bootloaders anyway. What I'm saying is, I should get an option that says nothing about bootloaders that lets me choose what I want my computer to do, rather than tell my computer what to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it does filter out worms, kinda. It recompiles the MIME message into multipart/mixed format, and renames attachments to remove fake file extensions. So to run a worm not only do you have to open an attachment but you have to open one that says "BABE.PIF" instead of "BABE.JPG.pif"
I did think about that. But I'm in no place to customize this for languages other than English. That would require Knowledge and Time, both of which I am short of. Plus, I'm following the good old Problem With Open Source #4521: Programming For The Self.
By "English characters" I mean ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ and the lowercase equivalents. If you want it to allow weird dutch characters, edit the source when it comes.
All the tests will be customizable and there will be name whitelists eventually. But that's a while off. You should note that it never deletes mail, it simply rewrites it with a different subject and recompiled MIME body.
It doesnt put a load on the server since it runs on your client. The engine could run on a server, of course, but I don't really think it warrants the term "engine", it's only a coupla hundred lines of code. It's pretty damn fast, except for the blacklist hunt described below, which is not noticeably slow, but would be when dealing with thousands of mails per minute.
It will do more tests in future on the body and headers, currently I theorised that I could spot most spam from the subject instantly, and then looked at what alerted me that it was spam.
I've added some more tests to it anyway, so now it can check for Bayesian hacking where there's loads of words and they're mostly longer than 3 characters, and also a rather nifty word decoder having read one poster on here who said there were several hundred million ways to spell "viagra". The decoder tries all possible variations on a curiously obfuscated word until it hits the blacklist (for example, V1a9ra -> V1agra -> Via9ra -> Viagra *bingo*).
Perhaps I should have made myself clear. And perhaps I should have thought a bit about that last section. When I say "block" I mean "ignore all RSTs from for a period of time". This will normally not cause a problem as RSTs are not critical.
As you can see, I'm backtracking having realised I made a really dumb suggestion. Anyway, the point I made above that still holds. Increase the sequence number size to 64 bit and problem solved (could possibly use that reserved field...) Anyway, before we increase the sequence number field to 64 bit perhaps we should think about doing it as-per-RFC where both ACK and SEQ numbers are checked on a RST. Most implementations DO NOT CHECK BOTH and this is what causes the flaw (as many have pointed out above me).
me.
2. This is not at all the same thing and in no way similar other than the fact "it uses TCP".
3. This vulnerability should not be called an RST flood. That would confuse it with a SYN flood which works totally differently and is much simpler. This should be called a broken window attack or something.
After noting all the other kinds of irrelevant TCP attack and reading up on this rather serious one, you wouldn't say it was broken? Could it be that, like everyone else including me, you never realised it was broken because you never looked close enough? It's called IPSEC, it's secure on the IP level up so TCP is encrypted over it. The simpler way to increase security would be to maintain current window size but increase the sequence number field to 64 bits wide. This would make it nigh-impossible to find where the window is sitting. Highways are fundamentally unsafe. They're full of retarded people shunting 3 ton hunks of metal around at speeds they're not comfortable with. But your point is void because people would not do that as they'd die as a result and kill a lot of people. I don't think a kid doing a TCP RST attack really needs to be that dedicated, and this could cost businesses millions of dollars if they don't wise up to it sharpish. Most people who'd took even a short course in networking would be wise to it already.
The best defence against this? Simply check for a stream of RST packets. They dont come in huge bundles with incrementing sequence numbers often. Detect that signature, block IP, sorted.
It does eight (yes, eight) tests on the subjects of every message. I havent even added body checking yet, and it catches most spam. I even tried replacing these 8 tests with the SpamAssassin engine and found that it was less good at detecting spam mails. The tests are so simple:
The blacklist is checked after first collapsing spaced-out words like "V I A G R A" and removing the above-mentioned obvious obfuscation. It's regex-based and contains the typical stuff like "meds" "medication" etc, but also a test for a subject that ends in 3 or more spaces followed by a string of random consonants.
When it detects SPAM, it simply changes the subject line to indicate that the message is spam.
In addition to spam-checking, it also removes all HTML mark-up (removes the tags leaving plaintext behind), deciphers MIMEd messages and recompiles them into multipart/mixed format (so images etc. are attachments) and renames many-extensioned attachments, so girl.jpg.pif becomes girl.pif.
It's still in dev, but it'll be available on baxpace.com in the next week or so for Win32 (as an exe) and UNIX platforms. It's written in Perl.
Is open up the GBA to home-brew developers. I am one of them, and I'm constantly annoyed by how Nintendo keeps me out of creating junk to run on their product that I paid for. I know all other consoles do this, but with such a simple little device, anyone can hack it and their sales of the thing would be even greater. Nintendo also lock out developers of games -- you have to go thru Nintendo and if you don't, you'll never sell anything. Independent developers cannot compete with Nintendo itself, and consequently the game market for the GBA is swamped with games costing $40 a whack that are usually not much more impressive than an old Sega Genesis game and don't appeal to me (I'm not into the whole faceless-anime-nonsense deal with characters and games that have no personality). It's very sad that such a sweet little machine is so closed up.
:) should have modded me troll, I was asking for it. It is interesting how Linux zealots can say the exact same thing about Linux being "better" than Win32, and that's never disputed by the Win32 crowd.
Linux does have terrible latency issues with sound, but OpenAL and ALSA have probably fixed that now. Linux also has an awful amount of different gfx APIs, because nobody can decide which is best, so OpenGL is still pretty much the standard sure-fire way of making sure the game will work. OpenGL is old now, and cobbled together with a ton of vendor-specific extensions making it nigh-impossible to ensure that the game will take advantage of the hardware features.
Currently, DirectX sets the *standards* for graphics card functionality. You can't get better support than that. Sorry.
You're all retarded. If you knew that this 96kb has: 1. Several texture generators .das.produkt 64k demos
2. AI engine
3. 3D engine with collision detection, mesh animation, mesh generation from simple primitives...
4. Software music synthesizer as used in the Candytron and
This is an extremely interesting production for its size. Just look at the textures. So it uses DX8, oh no. Go download the Heaven Seven demo if you want a software raytraced demo in 64kb. This is a game, not a demo.
Also, it won't run on Linux. Not everything has to run on Linux. This was made for windows. Windows has the best gaming and 3D support out there, Linux doesn't come close. If you wanted to play games, then why the hell do you run Linux? Linux is for work. And please don't cite a ton of games that have been ported to lux. The demoscene has always been for Windows/DOS only on the PC scene, since Windows is the best way to get the max out of gfx and audio hardware without compromising performance. It's just done better I'm afraid. I hope linux catches up someday, but the best way for it to do that would be to have MS port directx to it.
Increasing the volume is anti-clockwise if you hold the volume control still and turn the radio, like I always do...
Jesus what good has Java ever done anyway. All it's used for is games on mobile phones these days. I remember getting really excited in the past when everyone said Java would be powering my toaster by 2000!!! Not. Java was nothing but an extremely strongly typed and anally strict scripting language. Java should compile into blisteringly fast native code, because of it's incredibly pedantic internals it's easy to optimize automatically. But of course, it doesnt. It sits running on a virtual machine. A virtual machine that was written in C++. Long live the Java revolution.
.NET, since that's the same thing but done correctly, supports several languages, compiles from bytecode to native machine code only once on the host OS and runs machine code versions of executables after that point, and is just what Java should have been. Sun are crappy, and have little to do with Silicon Graphics, Inc either (why are so many people associating Sun with SGI?). The only relationship is that they teamed up in 2001 so Sun could go "please save java, SGI!".
.NET is a 20MB download, so it arrives faster, runs faster, and is just as portable. I can only thank Java and Sun for being so crappy that Microsoft had to come along and lay down some ass whoopings.
OK, so you can get a JIT compiler. Fab. Now things run only half as fast as competetive languages with a huge "HEAVEN FORBID, DONT TOUCH THE OS OR USE A NATIVE GUI" twist. Java disgusts me, it would have been a very good language but it lacks so much in terms of being realistic. People DO want to make OS calls and load up system shared objects and stuff. With Java, every time you start to code you're a million miles behind what's current for the architecture you're working on. When I was coding for java felt like using an Atari emulator, and ran about as fast.
For Java to succeed it needs to dominate the mobile market and take custom java chips (the virtual machine converted to a real machine) on board.
For the desktop computer, we'll all laugh at java and just use
The only reason people want java saved is because it's all they can code in because it was forced down their throats at university. Java's a learning language for those who want to grasp the concepts of object orientation and want to get a kick in the face whenever they do anything a bit risky, which is good for Universities who want a language that's also sandboxed in a VM and cant do any damage. It sure sucks for doing anything in the real world.
I realised how much java blows when I had to download 90MB of JVM to run a 200kb program, and even after install the program didnt work.
I think if all you look at is shitty-ass japanese naff-o-games like Metroid and junk, you're naturally going to see that all the women are as dreadfully faceless and dull as the men. Let's all play as the girl in that beat-em-up! She rocks because she's quick and has enormous breasts and weird coloured hair. Pitty she's piss-weak and hopeless.
Your cock-and-bull japanese filth games do not wash with me or anyone else with an iota of taste who'd rather play something with a plot and some decent dialogue.
If you want to see women in gaming done well why not look at the PC or Playstation scene where there's games like No One Lives Forever, Syberia, Broken Sword, and Prince of Persia: TSOT. All games that treat women with respect, don't give them whopping bosoms, stupid hair, enormous eyes or dumb squeaky voices that only ever say one word. Christ even since Wing Commander women have been portrayed brilliantly in gaming by western production companies. If you only analyze games from japan and china you're naturally going to see women treated as objects, now arent you?
With Microsoft applications only an idiot would need to look at the manual, but the manual is there to look at.
With Open Source / Free Software applications, the manual is usually a necessity for installing and operating the software correctly, but the manual does not exist.
"a unique combination of 2D graphics set against a 3D background"
PHWOAR groundbreaking! Just like:
Doom
Duke Nukem 3D
Hexen
Rise of the Triad
Wolfenstein 3D
Heretic
And thousands more.
Open Source did not evolve out of people complaining. It evolved out distributed development. One guy asking for help with his project and posting the source so other people could assist in the coding. I am not arguing against open source, I am arguing against software that does not also offer binaries for plain old users (which most do now, and some are even up to date)
* requires autoconf.
* requires filling your environment with nonsense in order to locate manpages, binaries, libs, etc
* useless with libraries because if you do this subsequent installations of other packages that depend on the first one are a real pain to configure.
is that compiling from source can sometimes even be slower executing depending on your compiler.
Also, better to install from packages because:
1. They WILL work
2. They install fast
3. They are easilly de-installed
4. They are painless
5. Dependencies are installed automatically sometimes, and other times packages are the only way to resolve a dependency loop
6. Most other OSes since the dawn of the home computer use pre-compiled binaries, and nobody has complained
7. It is surely the developers job to make sure it compiles properly and do all the compiler error headache solving
Packages are just so much nicer. A lot of the time, I can get pentium-optimised versions of the ones I want, and if I can't then 386 optimised versions are OK by me. The difference in speed one sees is pretty much only for the anally retentive, it is so minimal.
Please patent the idea of:
1. The Internet.
2. The Domain Name.
3. The e-mail Address.
4. Anything in an RFC.
This would mean that assholes could not come along and claim more patents on technology that is already patented by somebody else. When I say somebody nice, I mean someone who'll leave their patent to rot in the office and only ever get shirty when someone else tries to overpatent public knowledge.
But what does it matter? OpenOffice.org (which I've never seen a reason to use over MSO but am downloading now to give it a whirl) is free, no money is earned from it, so it's no skin off OOo's nose if it's adoption rate is low. I think that OOo probably just want to make a good product that 'nix users can use to do word processing and DTP, there is not much to pick between them other than price (OOo wins) and load times (MSO wins, even without suspicions of transparent quick start routines that certainly don't appear in my tasklist).
/.'s readership consists mainly of zealots and I will probably be shafted for this post.
Bottom line is, nobody really cares if OOo dominates MSO or vice versa except the zealots. OOo is currently nothing but a holistic alternative for Windows users and a necessity for Unix users. Perhaps I should remember that
I'd like to point out (in no relation to the post I replied to) that there seems to be a big "Windows is crappy!!" response to this story. Windows isn't crappy, it's users are crappy. And its users are crappy because most people are crappy, and windows is used by most people because it's easy to use (unlike Unix) and doesnt require you to spend over $2,000 in computer equipment (unlike Mac OS). It is, if you like, a compromise between those two great operating systems, taking the flexibility of one and the ease of use of the other and mishmashing them together at a low price tag. Everyone uses it because everyone can. Software's available and it works on everyone's computer. This is why everyone uses Windows, and while that's not necessarilly a good thing, it does mean that windows is the primary target for worms, just because so many people use Windows.
If you used Linux/Unix, that doesnt even HAVE file extensions for most things, so executables are not instantly recognisable as such. Running them by accident is so much easier. Shell scripts are even easier to run, Perl is a piece of cake to run. Just type
I didnt mean quite like that, plus it wasn't me who originally drew this comparison, I just paraphrased it from various media sources. What I was getting at is that the worms are evolving because Crappy But Popular Worm gets released, someone takes that code and improves it or modifies it, releases their own worm based on the old one, and then someone else gets that worm and modifies it, improves it, etc. and the process snowballs. Evolution. Not survival of the fittest but propagation of the sneakiest.
I like grub, but if I'm "Bob User" I should never be given the opportunity to bugger around with my bootloaders anyway. What I'm saying is, I should get an option that says nothing about bootloaders that lets me choose what I want my computer to do, rather than tell my computer what to do.