Maybe, but it'll still break if/when something fundamental changes in the kernel or C library -- which theoretically could happen anytime. That's the reason why distributions build their own binary packages and most project homepages only carry source tarballs (with perhaps binary packages for the developers' own systems).
Linux will never have binary compatibility -- in fact, that runs counter to the goal of the Linux project. It's always had, and always will have, source compatibility; that is, you can get any application to run on a new kernel and libs just by recompiling it. Now stop being a pussy and learn to spell "make".
If (a tiny subset of) the Good Guys can use it, then the Bad Guys can use it.
What will happen is that someone without malicious intention will discover how to turn off their own car. At first it'll only be used as a humorous party trick. Then, the same discovery will be made independently somewhere else (cf. the invention of the incandescent light bulb). But a trick is no good without an audience, and it will be shown off. At some point, the technique will reach the criminal fraternity. Not the "nice" criminal fraternity who do vaguely illegal things like grow a bit of weed, chase off a bunch of hunters, blow stuff up in out-of-the-way places or not pay for some of their toys; but the "nasty" criminals who do the really illegal stuff like people-smuggling, gun-running and terrorism and aren't afraid to maim and kill to get what they want. Some technically-bright but socially-dim kid will get out of their depth with a criminal gang and end up with an ultimatum: build a remote car-stopper for them, or else. The gadget will be cloned in third-world sweatshops {if not first-world sweatshops} before the day is out, and used for crime.
The exact same story has already happened before, and we never learned then.
Well, the last version of KOffice wasn't quite ready for the power-user -- some of the advanced features can behave a bit temperamentally -- and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. I'm unashamed of my preference for industrial-quality gear. On the other hand, it's still more than adequate for writing short letters and keeping home accounts; which is probably all that 90% of users want.
This is actually good news. But first, let me say how appalled I am that nobody ported it to Windows already -- the underlying Qt libraries have been available under the GPL for some time now, and according to Clause Six nobody could prevent some third party from porting them to Windows. Just goes to show what we already knew: Windows programmers are more interested in pirating closed-source payware and developing malware than in developing Free Software.
I've been using KOffice since mid-2002, and it's definitely getting there -- every release is noticeably better than the one before. And KOffice has two definite advantage over OO.o.
KOffice was written Open Source from the ground up. So everybody on the development team is intimately acquainted with the code; UNLIKE OpenOffice.org which began as a closed-source, proprietary application and featured the kind of gross misuses that would have had any CompSci student failed on the spot. It's amazing, the sort of crap people will come out with if they don't think anyone will ever see it.
KOffice is unabashedly ploughing its own furrow, NOT trying just to replicate MS Office -- so it won't get a whole star knocked off every time it dares to do something ever-so-slightly differently than MS Office.
If it can live up to the promise I've seen so far, KOffice could actually end up taking over from OpenOffice.org.
Qt 4, the underlying system library is now dual licensed GPL/commercial on the Windows platform by Trolltech, before only commercial on Windows.
Surely if Qt 3 was available under GPL, then it could have been ported to Windows anyway by any third party? TrollTech couldn't have prevented this according to GPL clause 6. The fact that apparently nobody bothered to do so only confirms my suspicion that Windows developers don't give a toss about software freedom and are interested only in writing closed-source payware applications, viruses and ad/spyware.
Shouldn't the lack of applicable software patents *increase* the offense of libel (I assume it's still illegal to lie in order to hurt competition in Europe) if it was made in Europe? Customer's don't necessarily know this, and it means that the chance Ballmer is telling the truth id effectively zero.
No; by the principle that ignorance of the law is no defence -- you are expected to know the Law of the Land. If a police officer commits a breach of PACE while arresting you, it's an illegal arrest; and even if you don't know at the time that it was an illegal arrest, you can get off. Ballmer's audience would be expected to know that software patents do not exist in Europe, and therefore no violation had occurred. Accusing somebody of doing something that isn't illegal doesn't count as a false accusation (so it can't be libel), and misrepresenting the law does not constitute an offence in and of itself.
However, the case could possibly be made that Microsoft were deliberately distorting the facts in order to scare potential Open Source customers into buying Microsoft products -- hence, there would be a financial gain for Microsoft as a result of their disingenuous (if not outright mendacious) claims -- and that does sound rather a lot like simple old-fashioned fraud. But it's a long shot.
You know, the whole "replacing letters with numbers and punctuation marks" thing is getting kind of dated now.
A historically popular, proprietary piece of BBS software for the IBM PC offered a (very popular) mailbox facility. There were rumours flying around that a future version of the software would allow the BBS sysop to charge for electronic mail messages. Charging would be by the letter; with spaces, digits and punctuation marks specifically excluded. The "elite" users responded by crafting readable messages entirely out of non-chargeable characters in order to demonstrate the absurdity of such a proposal.
Even if the facility was ever incorporated into the software, it was never actually used in real life. It's also worth pointing out that in those days, disassembling and editing binaries was by no means unfeasible.
Meanwhile, a group of immature kids who fancied themselves as "hackers" (at the risk of being called out on a "No True Scotsman" phallacy, a true hacker has more in common with a squatter than a burglar) picked up the wrong end of the stick and displayed their ignorance by continuing to craft messages out of "free" characters. The true elite laugh at them.
The common work-around is to file for an EU patent in Ireland (which does accept software patents, in spite of their illegality). This is then a valid, but unenforceable, patent in the UK. The purpose of doing this is to allow you to enforce the patent in the UK (and the rest of the EU) if software patents become legal.
There is a tiny flaw in that plan: it's bollocks.
A law cannot be enforced after the fact. For instance, if something I did yesterday gets banned tomorrow, I can't be prosecuted for it. Jurisdiction has limits in time as well as space.
This means that if software patents are ever accepted in the UK, previously-granted patents won't just become valid at once -- the holders will have to re-apply for them exactly as though their inventions were new. But of course they'll be refused, because there is prior art (in the shape of anything that might have violated a patent, save for the non-existence of said patent).
You can only break the laws of a sovereign nation whilst you are within the jurisdiction of that nation. That is part of the definition of sovereignty. If you are outside the USA, you can't by definition break US law. Whatever you did has to be illegal in both places. Also, you can never be extradited to face the death penalty; and it's pretty unlikely that you'd be extradited to face any penalty harsher than you would face in the country where you committed the offence.
If a resident of Saudi Arabia visits the UK and drinks alcohol (which is entirely legal under British law) then he can't be prosecuted for it when he returns home. Nor can a Briton be prosecuted in the UK for smoking cannabis in the Netherlands. (Interesting aside: A US aircraft is considered US territory while on the ground anywhere in the world. So does that mean a car with an NL sticker on it is considered Dutch territory while it is on the road anywhere in the world?)
There is no Lanham Act in UK law. Due to the exclusion of software from patents in UK law, the offences of which Ballmer is falsely accusing the various Linux distributors are actually non-existent. Unfortunately, Ballmer hasn't broken the law.
It should be SOP in any civil case for the respondent to claim that the suit is entirely without merit and the plaintiff and their representatives are being vexatious litigants.
Copyright is essentially a sweetener: it encourages people to create works of literary and/or artistic merit by offering them a temporary monopoly over their creations in return for a promise that someday, their work will be made available to everyone through the national archives.
Business letters are not in general works of art, and so are generally beyond the scope of copyright.
Didn't Cuddy the dwarf build a "thinking cap" for Detritus the troll, with a clockwork cooling fan to help cool his silicon brain so he could think faster? There's got to be a joke in there somewhere, what with trolls, cooling fans and everything else, but I'm too lazy to put the bits into the right order. Sort of like the maths teacher who, seeing the corridor on fire and an extinguisher on the wall, returned to bed satisfied that a solution existed.
Britain is a police state. No doubt about that. The next election has been deferred until Gordon Brown can work out how to make it a criminal offence not to vote for him.
However, there is a healthy population of outlaws. Dope smoking, movie downloading, blowing things up and dancing all night are alive and well..... just under most people's radar. It's mostly stupid people who get caught, and frankly they're no great loss.
Britain is basically two countries in one. The mainstream media, with its split personality (turning ordinary people into mindless, celebrity-obsessed chavs and simultaneously castigating them for being that way) created the whole mess (and look at this from 2001 for an example of mainstream-media hypocrisy..... though this one was about paedophilia, not terrorism..... it's saying something when the two are virtually interchangeable). The deep underground movement..... well, if you haven't heard of it, you're not meant to hear of it.
Back in The Days, getting tickets for a gig or a festival meant -- unless the venue was nearby and had their own box office -- going down to your local independent record store, and handing over pound notes to a human being. If they were sold out, you had to find a phone box (no mobiles then.....) and call up a few other record stores in the local area. If the event was a major one, you could usually get tickets from the Tourist Information Office (if your town had one). Sometimes you could find tickets for sale in the classified section of the local newspaper. And if you were shagging one of the record store staff, you were practically guaranteed first refusal on every gig ticket going:)
It was harder for ticket touts to buy up all the tickets to a particular event, because there was no centralised point of availability. And there was no eBay (although there were newspapers and post office windows). A tout would have had to visit every outlet in an area and placed adverts in the paper for a few nights. Also, most people wouldn't have paid over the odds: if it really came down to "see a tout or miss out", they'd have left it as late as possible, gambling on the ticket tout preferring selling the tickets at or even slightly below cost just so as not to be left with a bunch of worthless pieces of paper.
I really don't know what was so wrong with that system that they had to change it.
I was a little imprecise, I think. I didn't so much mean you had to speak the language, just know what it sounds like when spoken and maybe recognise a few words. You don't have to know how to construct a sentence or anything. Funny thing, language.
Anyone who speaks English can already read a few words in a few foreign languages, just from the ingredients lists on food packaging. Hearing a foreign language spoken, so you get the sounds (most languages don't use every single sound the human voicebox can make; English has haitches which are missing from the Southern European languages; French and German have a "u" sound that is missing from English; Dutch and German have a "ch" sound that is in Spanish but not in English {except in borrowed words}, and so forth) and the cadence (English seems unique among the Western languages, with its alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables) also helps you distinguish it.
Yeah, but bandwidth and disk space are cheap enough now and processors are fast enough that compiling everything isn't half as big a deal it used to be. There's no reason why you couldn't have all servers on one site able to run the same binaries; it's only a shallow dent.
Of course, you have to keep your special gcc on a detachable storage medium (CD or keyring USB drive) whenever it's not in use.
There's a particularly nasty rootkit out there which overwrites certain system programs (such as ls, ps, netstat, md5sum and a few others) with modified versions, then does a chattr to stop you overwriting them (though lsattr is left alone). And while attempting to clean up a machine so infected, I've seen Perl scripts changing the value of $0. This means even if you've got a "clean" ps around (like a copy of busybox in your own non-root home directory..... you do have a non-root login, don't you?), it will report the "wrong" thing. Another clue that this rootkit is installed, is that (at least on Debian and Slackware) coloured directory listings don't work properly, and invoking ls generates a non-fatal error message. (The "special" ls must be based on an older version.)
The www-data (Debian / Ubuntu) or apache (Fedora) user should not be running any process other than apache2 or httpd. If you see something like "accepting connections", that's a sign that someone could be running something nasty.
In general, watch for world-writable directories (they list with a green background in Debian) because that's one of the first steps in cracking a box..... install a script in a user's home directory, then persuade it to run. Beware of badly-written PHP scripts which don't chmod uploaded files to make them non-executable (turning off short open tags is also surprisingly effective). And what you think might be a DDoS (repeated attempts to retrieve mail on nonexistent accounts via POP3) might actually be a password-guesser. Block the/24 with an iptables rule at once. Note, if you aren't within walking distance of your co-lo, make your first firewall rule iptables -I INPUT 1 -s 10.20.30.40/32 -j ACCEPT (replace 10.20.30.40/32 by a subnet specifier which will always contain your own IP address -- get this from your broadband company -- and just to make you all jealous, my one ends in/32 because my IP is static) and never, ever use -I INPUT 1; use -I INPUT 2 or -A INPUT instead. It's too easy to block yourself out with an injudiciously-applied rule (and I do live within walking distance of my co-lo). If you see a process running that looks suspicious, leave it running long enough to examine its/proc entry before applying kill -9. Give users who don't need shell access a "shell" of/bin/true or/usr/games/fortune -o; but be sure to include whatever "shell" you gave them in/etc/shells -- otherwise they will not be able to use FTP. (If they don't have any web space on your server, just e-mail, then use/bin/false and don't put that in/etc/shells. That will make it harder to use an ftpd-based exploit.)
Note that the binaries in this rootkit are 32-bit..... so running 64-bit Debian (which has *no* 32-bit libraries) will break them. Personally, I'd like to see a patch that will make Perl give a segmentation fault if any script tries to alter $0. In fact, I'd like to see a kernel patch that will break any binary that was not compiled locally.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe, but it'll still break if/when something fundamental changes in the kernel or C library -- which theoretically could happen anytime. That's the reason why distributions build their own binary packages and most project homepages only carry source tarballs (with perhaps binary packages for the developers' own systems).
Linux will never have binary compatibility -- in fact, that runs counter to the goal of the Linux project. It's always had, and always will have, source compatibility; that is, you can get any application to run on a new kernel and libs just by recompiling it. Now stop being a pussy and learn to spell "make".
However the thing works, it's too damn dangerous.
If (a tiny subset of) the Good Guys can use it, then the Bad Guys can use it.
What will happen is that someone without malicious intention will discover how to turn off their own car. At first it'll only be used as a humorous party trick. Then, the same discovery will be made independently somewhere else (cf. the invention of the incandescent light bulb). But a trick is no good without an audience, and it will be shown off. At some point, the technique will reach the criminal fraternity. Not the "nice" criminal fraternity who do vaguely illegal things like grow a bit of weed, chase off a bunch of hunters, blow stuff up in out-of-the-way places or not pay for some of their toys; but the "nasty" criminals who do the really illegal stuff like people-smuggling, gun-running and terrorism and aren't afraid to maim and kill to get what they want. Some technically-bright but socially-dim kid will get out of their depth with a criminal gang and end up with an ultimatum: build a remote car-stopper for them, or else. The gadget will be cloned in third-world sweatshops {if not first-world sweatshops} before the day is out, and used for crime.
The exact same story has already happened before, and we never learned then.
$ echo "127.0.0.1 googleanalytics.com" >> /etc/hosts
/etc/hosts
.....
$ echo "127.0.0.1 www.googleanalytics.com" >>
Does the trick every time
Well, the last version of KOffice wasn't quite ready for the power-user -- some of the advanced features can behave a bit temperamentally -- and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. I'm unashamed of my preference for industrial-quality gear. On the other hand, it's still more than adequate for writing short letters and keeping home accounts; which is probably all that 90% of users want.
I've been using KOffice since mid-2002, and it's definitely getting there -- every release is noticeably better than the one before. And KOffice has two definite advantage over OO.o.
- KOffice was written Open Source from the ground up. So everybody on the development team is intimately acquainted with the code; UNLIKE OpenOffice.org which began as a closed-source, proprietary application and featured the kind of gross misuses that would have had any CompSci student failed on the spot. It's amazing, the sort of crap people will come out with if they don't think anyone will ever see it.
- KOffice is unabashedly ploughing its own furrow, NOT trying just to replicate MS Office -- so it won't get a whole star knocked off every time it dares to do something ever-so-slightly differently than MS Office.
If it can live up to the promise I've seen so far, KOffice could actually end up taking over from OpenOffice.org.Yeah, but MS Office cheats -- it preloads most of itself while the Windows window manager is starting up.
However, the case could possibly be made that Microsoft were deliberately distorting the facts in order to scare potential Open Source customers into buying Microsoft products -- hence, there would be a financial gain for Microsoft as a result of their disingenuous (if not outright mendacious) claims -- and that does sound rather a lot like simple old-fashioned fraud. But it's a long shot.
A historically popular, proprietary piece of BBS software for the IBM PC offered a (very popular) mailbox facility. There were rumours flying around that a future version of the software would allow the BBS sysop to charge for electronic mail messages. Charging would be by the letter; with spaces, digits and punctuation marks specifically excluded. The "elite" users responded by crafting readable messages entirely out of non-chargeable characters in order to demonstrate the absurdity of such a proposal.
Even if the facility was ever incorporated into the software, it was never actually used in real life. It's also worth pointing out that in those days, disassembling and editing binaries was by no means unfeasible.
Meanwhile, a group of immature kids who fancied themselves as "hackers" (at the risk of being called out on a "No True Scotsman" phallacy, a true hacker has more in common with a squatter than a burglar) picked up the wrong end of the stick and displayed their ignorance by continuing to craft messages out of "free" characters. The true elite laugh at them.
A law cannot be enforced after the fact. For instance, if something I did yesterday gets banned tomorrow, I can't be prosecuted for it. Jurisdiction has limits in time as well as space.
This means that if software patents are ever accepted in the UK, previously-granted patents won't just become valid at once -- the holders will have to re-apply for them exactly as though their inventions were new. But of course they'll be refused, because there is prior art (in the shape of anything that might have violated a patent, save for the non-existence of said patent).
You can only break the laws of a sovereign nation whilst you are within the jurisdiction of that nation. That is part of the definition of sovereignty. If you are outside the USA, you can't by definition break US law. Whatever you did has to be illegal in both places. Also, you can never be extradited to face the death penalty; and it's pretty unlikely that you'd be extradited to face any penalty harsher than you would face in the country where you committed the offence.
If a resident of Saudi Arabia visits the UK and drinks alcohol (which is entirely legal under British law) then he can't be prosecuted for it when he returns home. Nor can a Briton be prosecuted in the UK for smoking cannabis in the Netherlands. (Interesting aside: A US aircraft is considered US territory while on the ground anywhere in the world. So does that mean a car with an NL sticker on it is considered Dutch territory while it is on the road anywhere in the world?)
There is no Lanham Act in UK law. Due to the exclusion of software from patents in UK law, the offences of which Ballmer is falsely accusing the various Linux distributors are actually non-existent. Unfortunately, Ballmer hasn't broken the law.
It's not dangerous as long as you use something other than Adobe Reader to view it.
Apart from brand you a Vexatious Litigant.
It should be SOP in any civil case for the respondent to claim that the suit is entirely without merit and the plaintiff and their representatives are being vexatious litigants.
Copyright is essentially a sweetener: it encourages people to create works of literary and/or artistic merit by offering them a temporary monopoly over their creations in return for a promise that someday, their work will be made available to everyone through the national archives.
Business letters are not in general works of art, and so are generally beyond the scope of copyright.
So, it's basically the Holy Trinity again ..... the Pound, the Shilling and the Penny, that is .....
Didn't Cuddy the dwarf build a "thinking cap" for Detritus the troll, with a clockwork cooling fan to help cool his silicon brain so he could think faster? There's got to be a joke in there somewhere, what with trolls, cooling fans and everything else, but I'm too lazy to put the bits into the right order. Sort of like the maths teacher who, seeing the corridor on fire and an extinguisher on the wall, returned to bed satisfied that a solution existed.
Nobody is so enslaved as those who falsely believe themselves to be free.
Britain is a police state. No doubt about that. The next election has been deferred until Gordon Brown can work out how to make it a criminal offence not to vote for him.
..... just under most people's radar. It's mostly stupid people who get caught, and frankly they're no great loss.
..... though this one was about paedophilia, not terrorism ..... it's saying something when the two are virtually interchangeable). The deep underground movement ..... well, if you haven't heard of it, you're not meant to hear of it.
However, there is a healthy population of outlaws. Dope smoking, movie downloading, blowing things up and dancing all night are alive and well
Britain is basically two countries in one. The mainstream media, with its split personality (turning ordinary people into mindless, celebrity-obsessed chavs and simultaneously castigating them for being that way) created the whole mess (and look at this from 2001 for an example of mainstream-media hypocrisy
Back in The Days, getting tickets for a gig or a festival meant -- unless the venue was nearby and had their own box office -- going down to your local independent record store, and handing over pound notes to a human being. If they were sold out, you had to find a phone box (no mobiles then .....) and call up a few other record stores in the local area. If the event was a major one, you could usually get tickets from the Tourist Information Office (if your town had one). Sometimes you could find tickets for sale in the classified section of the local newspaper. And if you were shagging one of the record store staff, you were practically guaranteed first refusal on every gig ticket going :)
It was harder for ticket touts to buy up all the tickets to a particular event, because there was no centralised point of availability. And there was no eBay (although there were newspapers and post office windows). A tout would have had to visit every outlet in an area and placed adverts in the paper for a few nights. Also, most people wouldn't have paid over the odds: if it really came down to "see a tout or miss out", they'd have left it as late as possible, gambling on the ticket tout preferring selling the tickets at or even slightly below cost just so as not to be left with a bunch of worthless pieces of paper.
I really don't know what was so wrong with that system that they had to change it.
I was a little imprecise, I think. I didn't so much mean you had to speak the language, just know what it sounds like when spoken and maybe recognise a few words. You don't have to know how to construct a sentence or anything. Funny thing, language.
Anyone who speaks English can already read a few words in a few foreign languages, just from the ingredients lists on food packaging. Hearing a foreign language spoken, so you get the sounds (most languages don't use every single sound the human voicebox can make; English has haitches which are missing from the Southern European languages; French and German have a "u" sound that is missing from English; Dutch and German have a "ch" sound that is in Spanish but not in English {except in borrowed words}, and so forth) and the cadence (English seems unique among the Western languages, with its alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables) also helps you distinguish it.
Yeah, but bandwidth and disk space are cheap enough now and processors are fast enough that compiling everything isn't half as big a deal it used to be. There's no reason why you couldn't have all servers on one site able to run the same binaries; it's only a shallow dent.
Of course, you have to keep your special gcc on a detachable storage medium (CD or keyring USB drive) whenever it's not in use.
There's a particularly nasty rootkit out there which overwrites certain system programs (such as ls, ps, netstat, md5sum and a few others) with modified versions, then does a chattr to stop you overwriting them (though lsattr is left alone). And while attempting to clean up a machine so infected, I've seen Perl scripts changing the value of $0. This means even if you've got a "clean" ps around (like a copy of busybox in your own non-root home directory ..... you do have a non-root login, don't you?), it will report the "wrong" thing. Another clue that this rootkit is installed, is that (at least on Debian and Slackware) coloured directory listings don't work properly, and invoking ls generates a non-fatal error message. (The "special" ls must be based on an older version.)
..... install a script in a user's home directory, then persuade it to run. Beware of badly-written PHP scripts which don't chmod uploaded files to make them non-executable (turning off short open tags is also surprisingly effective). And what you think might be a DDoS (repeated attempts to retrieve mail on nonexistent accounts via POP3) might actually be a password-guesser. Block the /24 with an iptables rule at once. Note, if you aren't within walking distance of your co-lo, make your first firewall rule /32 because my IP is static) and never, ever use -I INPUT 1; use -I INPUT 2 or -A INPUT instead. It's too easy to block yourself out with an injudiciously-applied rule (and I do live within walking distance of my co-lo). If you see a process running that looks suspicious, leave it running long enough to examine its /proc entry before applying kill -9. Give users who don't need shell access a "shell" of /bin/true or /usr/games/fortune -o; but be sure to include whatever "shell" you gave them in /etc/shells -- otherwise they will not be able to use FTP. (If they don't have any web space on your server, just e-mail, then use /bin/false and don't put that in /etc/shells. That will make it harder to use an ftpd-based exploit.)
..... so running 64-bit Debian (which has *no* 32-bit libraries) will break them. Personally, I'd like to see a patch that will make Perl give a segmentation fault if any script tries to alter $0. In fact, I'd like to see a kernel patch that will break any binary that was not compiled locally.
The www-data (Debian / Ubuntu) or apache (Fedora) user should not be running any process other than apache2 or httpd. If you see something like "accepting connections", that's a sign that someone could be running something nasty.
In general, watch for world-writable directories (they list with a green background in Debian) because that's one of the first steps in cracking a box
iptables -I INPUT 1 -s 10.20.30.40/32 -j ACCEPT
(replace 10.20.30.40/32 by a subnet specifier which will always contain your own IP address -- get this from your broadband company -- and just to make you all jealous, my one ends in
Note that the binaries in this rootkit are 32-bit
Ah, fair enough. I must have just caught them on good days then :)
Except that with Firefox, you get the Source Code. Unless you speak fluent Pentium assembly language, there's a world of difference.