You don't install apps in/home (usually, I have done it on occasion) and I never suggested you did.
A profile is not an app.
And if Windows can't move its profile without also moving the references to it, that's still stupid. Granted, that issue could exist in Linux with text-based config files as opposed to a Registry - except that most of those will refer to/home - which, no matter what partition it's on will still refer to the correct location. C:\users is not the same as/home in behavior. A C:\users reference is a reference to a hard partition;/home is not.
Anybody want to address whether you can move "C:\Users" to its own partition - so you don't have to worry about losing profiles when you reinstall the OS?
Biggest problem with backups on Windows - Documents and Settings. Why? Because if you try to back it up, you get errors because Windows has open files in there that you can't touch from within the OS.
Can you say STUPID? I knew you could.
Try backing up/home from within Linux. Problems? Nope.
Try reinstalling Linux with your/home on another partition - the preferred "best practices" setup on Linux. Problems? Nope.
And if anybody at Microsoft from 1990 on had any clue, they would have looked at how UNIX did this simple stuff. It isn't rocket science, it's common sense and experience running an OS from the 1970's.
"Instead, MS once again used a greedy algorithm to optimize in the short term for developers! developers! developers! no matter how badly that screwed up their underpinnings."
Exactly my point above where I complain about MS's development model allowing - indeed, encouraging - crap software to be written that contributes to Windows lousy reliability.
Take QuickBooks. Those morons actually violated MS's "best practices" by allowing third party add-ons to communicate with QB using the Registry. That's why MS never certified QB for Windows XP.
Not to mention that you have to run QB Server Edition as ADMINISTRATOR AT ALL TIMES!
Nice. Why not just hand the hackers the keys to every small business's and every small business accountant's bank account directly? Post them on FaceBook...
I agree, MS isn't to blame for idiot developers. But they made it easy for idiot developers to get in the business of developing Windows software.
I'll add to that one more little trick Windows has.
When was the last time you told Linux to shut down and it DIDN'T?
Windows has SO LITTLE CONTROL over its system that applications can prevent it from shutting down cleanly! Not system utilities, not kernel modules, not drivers - APPLICATIONS!
I run the Hamachi VPN on my Windows XP side. If it's running and connected, trying to shut the system will frequently - not always - simply fail. Windows will sit there - no message, no nothing and simply refuse to shut down.
Same problem with killing processes. When I tell Linux "kill - 9 " - it's GONE! None of this wait half a minute, pop up a message saying, "Do you really want to do this", then wait another half minute, then - IF it worked, and many times it will NOT - get another message saying, "Just because you took a decision to kill a nonresponding process, can you send us a message about it?"
Please...
For that matter, how many times on Linux do you even SEE a "non-responding process"? Outside of the browsers, or occasionally one of the media players, anyway...
Try running Adobe Premiere, as one of my clients does on 12 of their machines. The crap crashes or locks up several times a day. The other day one deactivated itself spontaneously because they updated a driver for a video camera. God forbid you run the Matrox software on the same machine - that's another nightmare.
Why do I bring up Windows apps? Because they're crap. They're crap for a reason. And that reason is that Windows has an application model that nobody can write to without either producing crap or dropping the OS at some point.
That's the only possible explanation for the incredibly bad reliability of apps on Windows - which contributes to the incredibly bad reliability of Windows.
"1) Don't download and run random crap - that goes for any OS."
By this, I assume you mean "don't run any third party software not written by Microsoft".
Because the minute you do, the Windows Registry is no longer reliable (if it even is with Windows itself, which is questionable in itself), and eventually either Windows, the third party software, or a combo of the two will hose the Registry, thus bringing Windows to its knees.
I don't know HOW many times that has happened to people I've worked with.
"2) Sit behind a decent firewall - that also goes for any OS."
Which lets the Microsoft firewall out. Use a third-party firewall that blocks outbound and inbound connections, and allows greater freedom of configuration - ooops, you just run into problem number one.
"3) Don't have a blank or stupid password - hmm, again, good advice for any OS."
That's only a problem once something has compromised your machine by getting on it in the first place. Good advice, yes, but late to the party.
4) Get security updates regularly -" again, same for any OS, though it happens more often for windows."
For a reason.
"5) Don't use IE unless necessary - I'd say "same for any OS," but it is hard to violate this one on other OSes."
Got that right. Switch to Firefox, protect yourself almost immediately against 90% of the ActiveX threats.
For the other threats, install an AV - ooops, just ran into problem number one again - especially with Norton and McAfee, but others can do it too.
The reason Linux works and keeps working is simple: there is NO REGISTRY!
When's the last time you heard anybody on a Linux forum say, "Oh, your drivers are corrupted - reinstall?"
"Drivers" don't get corrupted. The Registry gets corrupted - regularly.
On Linux, you can have buggy drivers or misconfigured drivers. You never have "corrupted" drivers.
The same applies to almost everything else in Windows? When's the last time you heard somebody say they had a problem with a Linux "corrupted TCP/IP stack"? How many tools and utilities does Windows provide to "repair a corrupted TCP/IP stack?" How many do you find for Linux?
How many times does Linux just drop a device off the network for no known reason? Because a "Master Browser" decided it didn't know what the hell was going on and decided to "force an election"?
The only places where I've seen significant issues with Linux reliability is in the KDE and GNOME utilities and configurations. THEY can screw up. Most of the major subsystems of Linux do not (with the possible exception of sound subsystems.)
Comparing Windows to Linux is a joke. By design, Linux is vastly more reliable than Windows.
I don't know, I assume some of them do. I know most firewalls are configured to allow outbound by default, but I would assume some of them don't - or can be configured not to, so it would depend on the distro to set the default.
If none do, then Linux definitely is no better than Windows in this regard.
I was wondering about the possibility of it being partitioned myself.
The botnet has always been hard to figure out the size because of its policy of only allowing a limited number of immediate connections in its net. Partitioning and assigning control of sections to other people - and this would presumably entail cutting connections with other portions of the botnet completely in order to enforce "ownership" - would presumably make it look smaller than it is.
This guy may also be overconfident in the crawling ability of his tool.
OTOH, the bot has to communicate out. As a normal user not running as root, that means it has to open a port. Many Linux distro firewalls - and some Windows third party firewalls, but not the standard Windows firewall - block incoming and outgoing ports by default unless explicitly opened. If the bot can't commmunicate, it's worthless to the botnet.
Of course, the Worm might be smart enough to trick the user into opening a port by popping up a message and requesting it masquerading as a legit program - but I haven't heard of the ability in it. Therefore it would seem likely that a version compiled to run on Linux wouldn't work.
Another possibility is that the bot would know a way to fool any software firewall to let it out. Most of the Windows software firewalls can be easily bypassed. Only Comodo manages to prevent most of the more common techniques. I'm not sure if Linux software firewalls are as easily bypassed.
Any distro whose firewall that allowed local initiated Web contact by default, however, probably would allow it out.
Bots are a good reason to have a hardware firewall that blocks everything except explicitly opened ports in or out.
The article suggests that some of the BitTorrent downloads were due to slowdowns on the official site.
This supports what I've been saying all along - people do not pay for MUSIC, they pay for ACCESS to music. They have no problem paying $40 for a concert ticket, but they hate paying $20 for a CD they can keep (except for those merchandise freaks who love CDs simply because they're physical pieces of merchandise.)
Using P2P systems is a royal pain in the butt, until you've put it the time on one to master its intricacies.
But when the official site slowed down, people went to P2P who could.
The fact that the official site required registrations as well also would cause some people to use P2P if they already knew how.
This supports my thesis that what matters to people is ACCESS to music. They will pay to get the music they want, but they really aren't paying for the music itself. Generations who grew up with radio blaring free music all day isn't going to pay for music.
Yeah, it's bad for the end user, although the spammer won't care about that.
However, even there, the spammer probably does care - because the more screwed up the bot machine becomes, the quicker it will be wiped and reinstalled or disinfected, and thus the lower the sending rate (at least if the bots that go off the botnet aren't replaced as fast by new bots), and again the lower the rate of return on the spam. Also, ISPs are going to detect the mass sending of larger files faster than they do smaller emails, and are likely to be shutting down more of the botnets quicker (again, at least if the bots being shut down aren't replaced faster than they're shut down.)
It's a delicate balancing act the spammer has to use - how to get volume sending while still evading detection. Sending larger and larger files isn't going to help them much. Image spam was easy to detect, PDFs and XLS are harder because they could be legitimate, MP3's are going to be equally hard but not as common as PDFs and XLS files so they will be easier to detect.
I think the "blended" spam will be the big winner - small file sizes, hard to detect, and all you need are the same botnets hosting phony dynamic Web pages to send the malware and spam package to the idiots who click the links. And the links can be made completely legitimate-looking - just like phishing scams. It's the convergence of phishing and spamming.
Yeah, but to sell a pump-and-dump stock, how much verbiage is going to be really needed? Even if they can keep the file size down to a few hundred K, it's still bigger than an email text message, if not that much bigger than a PDF or XLS file. While they have more and more powerful botnets to send it with, it's still going to cost them more in rate of return than its worth, at least for many of them.
I see this as merely an experiment by spammers. If it works, we'll see more of it. If it doesn't, it will go away. My bet is that it will go away.
Besides the fact that such attachments are easy to identify and block, like the image span became, the problem for spammers is the reduced rate of return. The bigger the attachments they send out, including PDFs and Excel spreadsheets, which have take over for image span lately, the fewer they can send out with whatever bandwidth they've managed to steal with their botnets.
This reduces their rate of return on the spam, and encourages them to try to find ways to minimize the size of the spam so it can get through defenses and enable a greater volume of spam. Volume is the key to spam - if they can't send millions, they don't make enough money to make it worthwhile.
MP3's are pretty big - 3-5MB depending on the length of the material. Compared to a normal email text message, or even an Excel spreadsheet, they're huge.
So I suspect this is a temporary thing that will reduce in volume, just as image spam has reduced in volume lately from 30% of spam to around 5%.
What people are seeing now is more "blended" spam - spam with links to malicious Web sites. This sort of thing goes right through spam detectors, since the email itself can be innocuous - it's the links that contain the malware and the actual spam package.
Reminds me of an old William Burroughs article where he suggested calling in hoax calls to the cops and sending them on wild goose chases while insurgents strike elsewhere. This would be way more efficient.
A simple DoS on 9/11 would work, too. I just found this one on Google:
4-year-old does denial of service against 911 By Humphrey Cheung Friday, July 06, 2007 06:25 Carpentersville (IL) - A four-year-old girl is in big trouble after calling 911 hundreds of times on a mobile phone. Law enforcement officials say the Carpentersville girl called the emergency number 287 times in June and as much as 20 times per shift. She was finally caught after dispatchers promised to deliver McDonalds food (Happy Meal?) to the house.
The girl used her mother's deactivated mobile phone for the calls. All carriers in the United States must provide 911 access, even if regular phone service has been cut off.
Documents. Web pages. Download a Web page and you get a bunch of files. Download a bunch of Web pages and you get an even bigger bunch of files. Do that for a couple years, you'll have thousands of files. Need to rearrange your partitions and you need to copy them.
Bingo! 16,000 files not a problem. And we don't know if this bug hits at what size, anyway.
In my Miscellaneous directory under my Work directory, I currently have over 36,000 files, 33,000 of them in my "Utility Documentation" directory which holds the Web pages and other documents relating to the 1000 of so Windows utilities I have stored on the system.
Saying a bug is not a bug if nobody ever hits it is really not an excuse.
Worse, you get bugs like this when a developer starts thinking, "Oh, nobody will ever copy more than X files, so I can use an integer variable here..."
Yup. I've just about given up trying to copy gigabytes of files from large drives to backup drives because of this. I mean, once you've done this ONE TIME, it should be OBVIOUS to ANY designer that it needs to be fixed to allow the copy to continue - or resume - or SOMETHING other than just DYING.
Also, if Windows sees a zero-byte file, it can't handle it. I have to boot Linux and use it to delete the file.
Daily while working with clients I ask myself how anybody could use this garbage on a daily basis. When I reboot into Windows on my dual-boot openSuse/XP machine, I always dread it because I KNOW something is not going to work properly, or something extraneous will have to be done BEFORE I can do what I need to do.
1) these bot-net controlling Linux boxes probably were not hacked to root access level, but only Web server access level - which is not a problem with the OS.
2) And if they were hacked to root access level, it was probably not a kernel hack but a service level hack based on an unpatched service and a lazy admin.
Whereas when Windows gets hacked, it is USUALLY hacked at all sorts of levels - applications to services - ALL of which end up allowing arbitrary code with essentially "root" access (if not "system" access).
THIS is why Windows is less secure than Linux.
At the very least, THIS story does NOT prove that Linux is equally insecure to Windows AS AN OS.
Who cares if Novell wants to run attack ads against Red Hat? Where does it say in OSS that companies built on it have to love each other?
If the ads don't help Novell's pocketbook, they'll go away. If they do help, a Linux company get more business and Linux gets into more shops. That's a plus for Linux. If the ads work, Red Hat will try to become more interoperable with Windows. That's also a plus for Linux.
At the moment, some companies running Linux and Windows want interoperability. Eventually they're going to see that it's a waste of time and money - i.e., that Windows is a waste of time and money - and they might as well switch to Linux entirely. Then the issue becomes moot - and Linux wins again.
The problem with PJ is that she's too much into the adversarial nature of law. Everything is a big moral issue and needs to be fought over.
Ignore all of this. It's a non-issue. Microsoft is still losing against Linux and will continue to do so for the next ten or fifteen years until there is no Microsoft.
"We wouldn't term it strong, we would describe this as accommodating a certain element who needs more time."
Like I said, Microsoft sells lies, not software. No Microsoft employee authorized to talk to the public - and most that aren't - are anything but liars.
"When we're out there competing with Red Hat, [our salespeople] are saying, 'Our Linux is recommended by Microsoft"
Gotta laugh at this one. I know the guy really means that Microsoft is saying the SUSE works better with Windows (which isn't necessarily true except in specific areas where they have produced some interoperability), but it doesn't read like that.
Anybody who can say that line with a straight face should dump being a Linux salesperson and go into stand-up.
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You don't install apps in /home (usually, I have done it on occasion) and I never suggested you did.
/home - which, no matter what partition it's on will still refer to the correct location. C:\users is not the same as /home in behavior. A C:\users reference is a reference to a hard partition; /home is not.
A profile is not an app.
And if Windows can't move its profile without also moving the references to it, that's still stupid. Granted, that issue could exist in Linux with text-based config files as opposed to a Registry - except that most of those will refer to
Win for Linux; lose for Windows.
Tough noogies.
Anybody want to address whether you can move "C:\Users" to its own partition - so you don't have to worry about losing profiles when you reinstall the OS?
/home from within Linux. Problems? Nope.
/home on another partition - the preferred "best practices" setup on Linux. Problems? Nope.
Thought not.
See here for issues with even trying:
Biggest problem with backups on Windows - Documents and Settings. Why? Because if you try to back it up, you get errors because Windows has open files in there that you can't touch from within the OS.
Can you say STUPID? I knew you could.
Try backing up
Try reinstalling Linux with your
And if anybody at Microsoft from 1990 on had any clue, they would have looked at how UNIX did this simple stuff. It isn't rocket science, it's common sense and experience running an OS from the 1970's.
And Microsoft ignored all of it.
"Instead, MS once again used a greedy algorithm to optimize in the short term for developers! developers! developers! no matter how badly that screwed up their underpinnings."
Exactly my point above where I complain about MS's development model allowing - indeed, encouraging - crap software to be written that contributes to Windows lousy reliability.
Take QuickBooks. Those morons actually violated MS's "best practices" by allowing third party add-ons to communicate with QB using the Registry. That's why MS never certified QB for Windows XP.
Not to mention that you have to run QB Server Edition as ADMINISTRATOR AT ALL TIMES!
Nice. Why not just hand the hackers the keys to every small business's and every small business accountant's bank account directly? Post them on FaceBook...
I agree, MS isn't to blame for idiot developers. But they made it easy for idiot developers to get in the business of developing Windows software.
I'll add to that one more little trick Windows has.
When was the last time you told Linux to shut down and it DIDN'T?
Windows has SO LITTLE CONTROL over its system that applications can prevent it from shutting down cleanly! Not system utilities, not kernel modules, not drivers - APPLICATIONS!
I run the Hamachi VPN on my Windows XP side. If it's running and connected, trying to shut the system will frequently - not always - simply fail. Windows will sit there - no message, no nothing and simply refuse to shut down.
Same problem with killing processes. When I tell Linux "kill - 9 " - it's GONE! None of this wait half a minute, pop up a message saying, "Do you really want to do this", then wait another half minute, then - IF it worked, and many times it will NOT - get another message saying, "Just because you took a decision to kill a nonresponding process, can you send us a message about it?"
Please...
For that matter, how many times on Linux do you even SEE a "non-responding process"? Outside of the browsers, or occasionally one of the media players, anyway...
Try running Adobe Premiere, as one of my clients does on 12 of their machines. The crap crashes or locks up several times a day. The other day one deactivated itself spontaneously because they updated a driver for a video camera. God forbid you run the Matrox software on the same machine - that's another nightmare.
Why do I bring up Windows apps? Because they're crap. They're crap for a reason. And that reason is that Windows has an application model that nobody can write to without either producing crap or dropping the OS at some point.
That's the only possible explanation for the incredibly bad reliability of apps on Windows - which contributes to the incredibly bad reliability of Windows.
"1) Don't download and run random crap - that goes for any OS."
By this, I assume you mean "don't run any third party software not written by Microsoft".
Because the minute you do, the Windows Registry is no longer reliable (if it even is with Windows itself, which is questionable in itself), and eventually either Windows, the third party software, or a combo of the two will hose the Registry, thus bringing Windows to its knees.
I don't know HOW many times that has happened to people I've worked with.
"2) Sit behind a decent firewall - that also goes for any OS."
Which lets the Microsoft firewall out. Use a third-party firewall that blocks outbound and inbound connections, and allows greater freedom of configuration - ooops, you just run into problem number one.
"3) Don't have a blank or stupid password - hmm, again, good advice for any OS."
That's only a problem once something has compromised your machine by getting on it in the first place. Good advice, yes, but late to the party.
4) Get security updates regularly -" again, same for any OS, though it happens more often for windows."
For a reason.
"5) Don't use IE unless necessary - I'd say "same for any OS," but it is hard to violate this one on other OSes."
Got that right. Switch to Firefox, protect yourself almost immediately against 90% of the ActiveX threats.
For the other threats, install an AV - ooops, just ran into problem number one again - especially with Norton and McAfee, but others can do it too.
The reason Linux works and keeps working is simple: there is NO REGISTRY!
When's the last time you heard anybody on a Linux forum say, "Oh, your drivers are corrupted - reinstall?"
"Drivers" don't get corrupted. The Registry gets corrupted - regularly.
On Linux, you can have buggy drivers or misconfigured drivers. You never have "corrupted" drivers.
The same applies to almost everything else in Windows? When's the last time you heard somebody say they had a problem with a Linux "corrupted TCP/IP stack"? How many tools and utilities does Windows provide to "repair a corrupted TCP/IP stack?" How many do you find for Linux?
How many times does Linux just drop a device off the network for no known reason? Because a "Master Browser" decided it didn't know what the hell was going on and decided to "force an election"?
The only places where I've seen significant issues with Linux reliability is in the KDE and GNOME utilities and configurations. THEY can screw up. Most of the major subsystems of Linux do not (with the possible exception of sound subsystems.)
Comparing Windows to Linux is a joke. By design, Linux is vastly more reliable than Windows.
I don't know, I assume some of them do. I know most firewalls are configured to allow outbound by default, but I would assume some of them don't - or can be configured not to, so it would depend on the distro to set the default.
If none do, then Linux definitely is no better than Windows in this regard.
I was wondering about the possibility of it being partitioned myself.
The botnet has always been hard to figure out the size because of its policy of only allowing a limited number of immediate connections in its net. Partitioning and assigning control of sections to other people - and this would presumably entail cutting connections with other portions of the botnet completely in order to enforce "ownership" - would presumably make it look smaller than it is.
This guy may also be overconfident in the crawling ability of his tool.
OTOH, the bot has to communicate out. As a normal user not running as root, that means it has to open a port. Many Linux distro firewalls - and some Windows third party firewalls, but not the standard Windows firewall - block incoming and outgoing ports by default unless explicitly opened. If the bot can't commmunicate, it's worthless to the botnet.
Of course, the Worm might be smart enough to trick the user into opening a port by popping up a message and requesting it masquerading as a legit program - but I haven't heard of the ability in it. Therefore it would seem likely that a version compiled to run on Linux wouldn't work.
Another possibility is that the bot would know a way to fool any software firewall to let it out. Most of the Windows software firewalls can be easily bypassed. Only Comodo manages to prevent most of the more common techniques. I'm not sure if Linux software firewalls are as easily bypassed.
Any distro whose firewall that allowed local initiated Web contact by default, however, probably would allow it out.
Bots are a good reason to have a hardware firewall that blocks everything except explicitly opened ports in or out.
The article suggests that some of the BitTorrent downloads were due to slowdowns on the official site.
This supports what I've been saying all along - people do not pay for MUSIC, they pay for ACCESS to music. They have no problem paying $40 for a concert ticket, but they hate paying $20 for a CD they can keep (except for those merchandise freaks who love CDs simply because they're physical pieces of merchandise.)
Using P2P systems is a royal pain in the butt, until you've put it the time on one to master its intricacies.
But when the official site slowed down, people went to P2P who could.
The fact that the official site required registrations as well also would cause some people to use P2P if they already knew how.
This supports my thesis that what matters to people is ACCESS to music. They will pay to get the music they want, but they really aren't paying for the music itself. Generations who grew up with radio blaring free music all day isn't going to pay for music.
Fuck that! Leave the little fuckers up there! We got enough roaches in San Francisco!
Once they leave, they need to stay gone!
Morons.
Yeah, it's bad for the end user, although the spammer won't care about that.
However, even there, the spammer probably does care - because the more screwed up the bot machine becomes, the quicker it will be wiped and reinstalled or disinfected, and thus the lower the sending rate (at least if the bots that go off the botnet aren't replaced as fast by new bots), and again the lower the rate of return on the spam. Also, ISPs are going to detect the mass sending of larger files faster than they do smaller emails, and are likely to be shutting down more of the botnets quicker (again, at least if the bots being shut down aren't replaced faster than they're shut down.)
It's a delicate balancing act the spammer has to use - how to get volume sending while still evading detection. Sending larger and larger files isn't going to help them much. Image spam was easy to detect, PDFs and XLS are harder because they could be legitimate, MP3's are going to be equally hard but not as common as PDFs and XLS files so they will be easier to detect.
I think the "blended" spam will be the big winner - small file sizes, hard to detect, and all you need are the same botnets hosting phony dynamic Web pages to send the malware and spam package to the idiots who click the links. And the links can be made completely legitimate-looking - just like phishing scams. It's the convergence of phishing and spamming.
Yeah, but to sell a pump-and-dump stock, how much verbiage is going to be really needed? Even if they can keep the file size down to a few hundred K, it's still bigger than an email text message, if not that much bigger than a PDF or XLS file. While they have more and more powerful botnets to send it with, it's still going to cost them more in rate of return than its worth, at least for many of them.
I see this as merely an experiment by spammers. If it works, we'll see more of it. If it doesn't, it will go away. My bet is that it will go away.
Besides the fact that such attachments are easy to identify and block, like the image span became, the problem for spammers is the reduced rate of return. The bigger the attachments they send out, including PDFs and Excel spreadsheets, which have take over for image span lately, the fewer they can send out with whatever bandwidth they've managed to steal with their botnets.
This reduces their rate of return on the spam, and encourages them to try to find ways to minimize the size of the spam so it can get through defenses and enable a greater volume of spam. Volume is the key to spam - if they can't send millions, they don't make enough money to make it worthwhile.
MP3's are pretty big - 3-5MB depending on the length of the material. Compared to a normal email text message, or even an Excel spreadsheet, they're huge.
So I suspect this is a temporary thing that will reduce in volume, just as image spam has reduced in volume lately from 30% of spam to around 5%.
What people are seeing now is more "blended" spam - spam with links to malicious Web sites. This sort of thing goes right through spam detectors, since the email itself can be innocuous - it's the links that contain the malware and the actual spam package.
Reminds me of an old William Burroughs article where he suggested calling in hoax calls to the cops and sending them on wild goose chases while insurgents strike elsewhere. This would be way more efficient.
A simple DoS on 9/11 would work, too. I just found this one on Google:
4-year-old does denial of service against 911
By Humphrey Cheung
Friday, July 06, 2007 06:25
Carpentersville (IL) - A four-year-old girl is in big trouble after calling 911 hundreds of times on a mobile phone. Law enforcement officials say the Carpentersville girl called the emergency number 287 times in June and as much as 20 times per shift. She was finally caught after dispatchers promised to deliver McDonalds food (Happy Meal?) to the house.
The girl used her mother's deactivated mobile phone for the calls. All carriers in the United States must provide 911 access, even if regular phone service has been cut off.
Documents. Web pages. Download a Web page and you get a bunch of files. Download a bunch of Web pages and you get an even bigger bunch of files. Do that for a couple years, you'll have thousands of files. Need to rearrange your partitions and you need to copy them.
Bingo! 16,000 files not a problem. And we don't know if this bug hits at what size, anyway.
In my Miscellaneous directory under my Work directory, I currently have over 36,000 files, 33,000 of them in my "Utility Documentation" directory which holds the Web pages and other documents relating to the 1000 of so Windows utilities I have stored on the system.
Saying a bug is not a bug if nobody ever hits it is really not an excuse.
Worse, you get bugs like this when a developer starts thinking, "Oh, nobody will ever copy more than X files, so I can use an integer variable here..."
Yup. I've just about given up trying to copy gigabytes of files from large drives to backup drives because of this. I mean, once you've done this ONE TIME, it should be OBVIOUS to ANY designer that it needs to be fixed to allow the copy to continue - or resume - or SOMETHING other than just DYING.
Also, if Windows sees a zero-byte file, it can't handle it. I have to boot Linux and use it to delete the file.
Daily while working with clients I ask myself how anybody could use this garbage on a daily basis. When I reboot into Windows on my dual-boot openSuse/XP machine, I always dread it because I KNOW something is not going to work properly, or something extraneous will have to be done BEFORE I can do what I need to do.
Pathetic OS. Just pathetic.
1) these bot-net controlling Linux boxes probably were not hacked to root access level, but only Web server access level - which is not a problem with the OS.
2) And if they were hacked to root access level, it was probably not a kernel hack but a service level hack based on an unpatched service and a lazy admin.
Whereas when Windows gets hacked, it is USUALLY hacked at all sorts of levels - applications to services - ALL of which end up allowing arbitrary code with essentially "root" access (if not "system" access).
THIS is why Windows is less secure than Linux.
At the very least, THIS story does NOT prove that Linux is equally insecure to Windows AS AN OS.
Get your facts straight.
People just want to start pointless arguments.
Who cares if Novell wants to run attack ads against Red Hat? Where does it say in OSS that companies built on it have to love each other?
If the ads don't help Novell's pocketbook, they'll go away. If they do help, a Linux company get more business and Linux gets into more shops. That's a plus for Linux. If the ads work, Red Hat will try to become more interoperable with Windows. That's also a plus for Linux.
At the moment, some companies running Linux and Windows want interoperability. Eventually they're going to see that it's a waste of time and money - i.e., that Windows is a waste of time and money - and they might as well switch to Linux entirely. Then the issue becomes moot - and Linux wins again.
The problem with PJ is that she's too much into the adversarial nature of law. Everything is a big moral issue and needs to be fought over.
Ignore all of this. It's a non-issue. Microsoft is still losing against Linux and will continue to do so for the next ten or fifteen years until there is no Microsoft.
Relax and enjoy the show.
the actual agents assigned are Scully and Mulder - so there's nothing to worry about.
Except all the alien abductions that will never get investigated now...
"We wouldn't term it strong, we would describe this as accommodating a certain element who needs more time."
Like I said, Microsoft sells lies, not software. No Microsoft employee authorized to talk to the public - and most that aren't - are anything but liars.
"When we're out there competing with Red Hat, [our salespeople] are saying, 'Our Linux is recommended by Microsoft"
Gotta laugh at this one. I know the guy really means that Microsoft is saying the SUSE works better with Windows (which isn't necessarily true except in specific areas where they have produced some interoperability), but it doesn't read like that.
Anybody who can say that line with a straight face should dump being a Linux salesperson and go into stand-up.
The metaphysical question is: is there a real difference between the real Miguel and the Miguel troll?
Yeah, but you gotta put Ikea stuff together yourself.
And Ballmer has demonstrated with Vista that he can't put anything together.
He can break stuff, though.
Or maybe he likes Ikea because it's ALREADY broken?
"Now who doesn't want to be like Bill Gates?"
I want his money, of course, everybody does.
But be like him? A major asshole like that?
I'd shoot myself first.
Unfortunately, a lot of people already think I'm a major asshole.
However, I'm not a major asshole LIKE BILL.
There's are differences even in assholes.
from somebody trying to start a flame war.
When can we start marking articles posted here and elsewhere as "flamebait" or "troll"?