As loathe as I am to say it now, Microsoft has actually show us the benefit of "standards"
must resist urge to flame.... must resssissssst.......move hands away from keyboard... take deeeeeep breaths....
The market dominance however, has shown us the benefit of having "standard" file types such as.doc that just about everybody in certain industries uses exclusively
resistance fading... cant hold out much longer... cant stay quiet in the face of such insanity... must... leave... slashdot...
I still use it every day- it does everything I need in an emacsy sort of a way (which those of us working mostly from a command line like- we like a lot!!!)
look at distrowatch.com (or alternatively actually use and compare the distibutions yourself)
The article specifically covered public web servers running apache- a pretty narrow sector. Although its tone seemed to suggest that it was in fact measuring all linux installations- it wasnt.
Mandrake continually tops polls of total desktop Linux installations. Mandrake is in fact the best distribution in a number of ways for desktop (not just gui) or developer machines.
Mandrake is not marketed as agressively as Suse or RedHat, so it is often overlooked by industry "experts". But look around, and try to look a little deeper and the evidence speaks for itself.
Again- actually compare the distributions yourself, and the pros and cons quickly become glaringly obvious
Nobody is saying that "SCO Code" isnt in the kernel. The debate is whether the "SCO Code", which is more corectly refered to as "System V" code that is present in the kernel is licenced or not (and seeing as SCO have previously released this code under the GPL, and that System V incorporates a lot of BSD code, it is quite clearly licenced)
Lets just clear up a couple of misunderstandings here for Steven Evans (BBC Journalist)...
But, in the case of the MyDoom computer worm
MyDoom is a virus, not a worm- I know that "worm" sounds more exciting, dangerous and computery, but a "worm", MyDoom definately is not. see www.wikipedia.org
Two years ago, SCO claimed that it owned more than 800,000 lines of the system which had always been available for free and to anyone since its invention in 1991
Yes, but unfortunately, they never managed to provide a shred of credible evidence to back up this spurious claim. The evidence that has been provided so far (and there really has been very little) has swiftly been discounted by experts. Additionally, there are the small issues of SCO previously distributing Linux and System V (the system that has alledgedly been copied) themselves in the past under both the BSD, and GPL licences, which would in anycase nullify any reasonably claim.
On top of that, SCO has sued IBM, accusing it of using SCO property because it too uses Linux
No- it is sueing IBM for SELLING Linux
If anyones anger has no measure, it is the wrath of internet zealots who believe that code should be free to all (open source).
If anyones anger has no measure it is suicide bombers, serial murderers, violent dictators, psycopaths and so on. The vast majority of sensible human beings who meditate on the viability/ethics/practicalities/commercial aspects of software development, eventually conclude that open source is the most effective model for the largest amount of people
SCO is the big, bad company that violates one of their sacred principles, as they would see it.
No- SCO is a wannabe big, bad company. It is actually a failed Linux vendor (Caldera) from Utah that has decided to litigate its way into profit, while simultaniously boosting share value for its stock holders.
It represents a new degree of viciousness in internet warfare: a wickedly ingenious programme persuades thousands of computers to bombard a single website on a particular date.
Erm, the idea of using a virus/worm to create multiple launch pads for a massive attack on one target is hardly a new one
It's hard to see how any website could withstand that kind of clever evil.
Putting aside for one moment the use of the words "clever" and "evil" in this context (because such an attack would be neither), all that would be required is some inventive firewall administration
The attack also raises the possibility of internet blackmail, with companies threatened by individuals or even an individual who might be anywhere.
This possibility has been alive and well for years- dont they give you any reading material in the BBC canteen?
This attack, though, is not blackmail. It is about malice not money.
I think the point of the attack, which I personally do not agree with, is to draw attention to a poorly understood yet vitally important legal argument. You do not have to be a particulary malicious person, to find SCOs actions objectionable
A "trojan" does not, by definition, reinfect another machine- it is essentially a "one time" infection. A trojan that propagates would be more correctly termed "virus".
A worm does indeed attack, infect and spread over a network automatically, ergo MyDoom cannot be described as a worm because it spreads by tricking a computer user, and therefore does not reinfect of its own volition
There has been a marked increase in windows fanboys in the last year or so on slashdot, and if most posts are going to be made by non linux/bsd users (and worse, people who have no intention of ever becoming one) then really- what is the point of slashdot?
Did you see the recent(ish) slashdot poll concerning which email program most people use? Outlook won by a mile!! compare that to the previous poll on the same topic from 4 years ago, and it was Pine, with a respectable showing from Mutt. I think that says it all.
Slashdotters have to return to being passionate about linux, sco and open source in general, so that the pseudo geeks who complain about their outlook inbox being clogged on their poorly administered microsoft network will go away. Then the rest of us can get on with discussing the real, interesting issues.
myDoom is not a worm it it a virus. A worm propagates without user interaction whereas a virus relies on the (unintentional) action of a human to spread, mostly clicking on email attachments. That is to say a virus attaches itself to another executable file (commonly, but not exclusively, an email). A worm is a purely self replicating program.
Mr McBride and the media in general- stop calling MyDoom a worm, I know it sounds more dramatic and "computery" than virus, but VIRUS is what it is
Is Joel Spolsky anything more than a bit of a power tripper? I am a bit fed up with the "at fog creek we are the best, and I am the boss so I am even better" sentiment that seems to form the basis of most of Spolskys articles, not to mention the "and I love lording it over the great unwashed who dare to think that they would even be considered for employment at the mighty Fog Creek Software", which has been a recurrent theme in more than a few. I am also a slightly mystified as to why the great Joel Spolsky gets so much coverage on slashdot, seeing as he is on record as being a bit of a microsoft apologist, and general proprietary software fanboy (especially the rather generic and uninspired applications produced by his company, fog creek)
Sorry for being negative, but the guy just bugs me.
Some of the points that he brings up from time to time are reasonably interesting, but rarely inspiring or revolutionary.
As I'm sure many people have said already (but this article has a lot of posts so I'll say it again), an honourary knighthood is not the same as a knighthood. an honourary knighthood is the knighthood that is given to non-british people, and among other things DOES NOT bestow the salutation of 'sir' to the recipient. Neither does it give you a seat in the house of lords.
see here for an overview of the full british honours system
The whole point of linux is that development decisions arent made by corporations, and the wisdom of this ideal is underlined by the demise of the fratrecidal corporate entity known (ironically) as "United Linux"
The only group of people who should decide what linux "needs" are the users. Linux development cannot be hijacked by commercial interests.
The most interesting aspect of the demise of UL is what it actually means to we, the linux using public. And what it actually means is not very much at all. Life under the penguin goes on and continues to improve whether these self appointed commercial consortiums exist or not.
The only way Pearl Harbor would be applicable is if you were using it in the context of Microsoft deliberately allowing crippling attacks on it's software so as to push through a new system whereby it (MS) has ultimate control.
In that case isnt the name "Pearl Harbour" completely applicable?;o)
Based on conservative projections, we'll discover about 100,000 new software vulnerabilities in 2010 alone, or one new bug every five minutes of every hour of every day. The number of security incidents worldwide will swell to about 400,000 a year, or 8,000 per workweek.
Finding software vunerabilities is not a bad thing. But what really matters is not how many vunerabilities you find, but how many you actually have and how quickly you fix them. Ultimately identifying vunerabilities makes applications better.
2)
Windows will approach 100 million lines of code, and the average PC, while it may cost $99, will contain nearly 200 million lines of code. And within that code, 2 million bugs.By 2010, we'll have added another half-a-billion users to the Internet. A few of them will be bad guys, and they'll be able to pick and choose which of those 2 million bugs they feel like exploiting.
in 2010 nobody will be using windows
3)
Five factors distinguish the digital Pearl Harbor from the virus attacks we've suffered to date.
First, it disrupts backup systems. Fragile networks heretofore have been mitigated largely with backup. Disrupt that and badness follows.Second, it leads to cascading failures. All of those massively inconvenient attacks people previously referred to as Pearl Harbors pile up. Due to the loss of backup, corporate earnings data is irretrievably lost. This panics Wall Street and destabilizes the financial sector. People run to their banks, but the banks cannot disburse funds; their networks are down. As are the credit card networks and the ATMs
This just does not and cannot happen in a heterogeneous IT environment such as the one we have today, and the one that we will have to an even greater extent in 5-10 years. A virus that destroys a win2000 installation is not going to have much effect on a Solaris system, or the other way round. Additionally, important backups are kept in a non-networked environment, for this very reason. The only way that these can (possibly) be taken out is to launch a gradual attack over a long period of time, but such an attack would not go unnoticed over the entire globe without the alarm being raised. Besides the author talks specifically of an instantaneous attack.
4)
Fourth, after it's over, the attack's origin is pinpointed and the vulnerability it exploited is determined. That's another element that's been missing from most recent security events, especially virus outbreaks, and most notably in the August 2003 blackout. Blame has not been assigned; no heads have rolled. No one has even called for heads to roll. No heads can be found to roll.
The authorities have proved startlingly ineffective when it comes to locating the point of origin of attacks in recent years. In the cases where a perpetrator has been (correctly) identified, this has generally been at the perps wishes (confession, inclusion of email address, registered server, IP address etc).
5)
The first response is litigation. Lawyers will prosecute vendors, ISPs and others based on downstream liability; that is, they will follow the chain of negligence and hold people accountable all along it. Hackers, whether their intent was malicious or not, will be arrested and prosecuted. If the event's nexus is overseas, foreign governments will cooperate to bring the miscreants to justice.
Again recent history has shown a remarkable lack of international cooperation when it comes to identifying and extraditing "hackers" (lets not pick up on the misuse of this word here). Additionally, where are you going to apportion for flaws in the open source software that the backbone of the internet mostly runs on today, and will do so almost entirely in the future?
6)
So there will be a surge in the development of software that blocks access to applications such as chat rooms, the Web, databases, whatever. And even features within programs, like the ability to forward e-mail messages, will be shut off. Again, the thinking is that since openness got us into this mess, only a lockdown will get us out of it.
There will be a surge in the corporate purchase of such software, but it will be extremely easy to circumnavigate
A few people have said it above, but I'll say it again- Unreal Tournament 2003 rocks on linux!!
It runs quite nicley with full resolution/textures/shading on my home machine (P4 2.4, NVidia GForce-1 year old), so I think it would run ok on a P4 1.7 with a 2 year old nvidia, even if it meant screwing down some of the detailing (which you can do from the settings menu in a variety of ways)
Well good for your friends, Im so happy their daddy got them jobs
Certainly in the financial sector all is good - pay is rising, bonuses look promising, and companies are recruiting.
Oh well thats ok then, it is after all the health of the financial sector that is paramount.
Obviously there are sections of the UK that are poor - Wales, Scotland sans Edinburgh, and utter dives like Hull. However this tends to be due to the abject lack of skilled workers available in these areas.
hmmm... dont quite know where to start here.
vrai- you would benefit greatly from the extraction of your naive head from your privately educated english arse sometime in the future...
1) Talks in grandious terms about his expertise in managing a large open source project (http://leopard.sourceforge.net/) which on closer inspection seems to be empty and unused vapourware
2) homepage (http://www.consultingtimes.com/) is a very recently started blog whos purpose seems to be to establish the author as some kind of authority on Open Source
3) Seems at several points to be making sales pitches towards US local government.
4) The letter from the CIO just doesnt ring true...
conclusion: this seems to be a ropey attempt to establish credability in potential US local government clients by somebody not quite as into Open Source as he would like us (and his potential clients) to believe
Slashdot Mirror
For the French speaking part of europe at least, Kelkoo is the best branded website of all.
Use them, and you wont ever have to worry about viruses...
you say what many think.
You say: "terrorist"
You mean: "enemy of corporate america's interests"
I still use it every day- it does everything I need in an emacsy sort of a way (which those of us working mostly from a command line like- we like a lot!!!)
The article specifically covered public web servers running apache- a pretty narrow sector. Although its tone seemed to suggest that it was in fact measuring all linux installations- it wasnt.
Mandrake continually tops polls of total desktop Linux installations. Mandrake is in fact the best distribution in a number of ways for desktop (not just gui) or developer machines.
Mandrake is not marketed as agressively as Suse or RedHat, so it is often overlooked by industry "experts". But look around, and try to look a little deeper and the evidence speaks for itself.
Again- actually compare the distributions yourself, and the pros and cons quickly become glaringly obvious
Nobody is saying that "SCO Code" isnt in the kernel. The debate is whether the "SCO Code", which is more corectly refered to as "System V" code that is present in the kernel is licenced or not (and seeing as SCO have previously released this code under the GPL, and that System V incorporates a lot of BSD code, it is quite clearly licenced)
MyDoom is a virus, not a worm- I know that "worm" sounds more exciting, dangerous and computery, but a "worm", MyDoom definately is not. see www.wikipedia.org
Yes, but unfortunately, they never managed to provide a shred of credible evidence to back up this spurious claim. The evidence that has been provided so far (and there really has been very little) has swiftly been discounted by experts. Additionally, there are the small issues of SCO previously distributing Linux and System V (the system that has alledgedly been copied) themselves in the past under both the BSD, and GPL licences, which would in anycase nullify any reasonably claim.
No- it is sueing IBM for SELLING Linux
If anyones anger has no measure it is suicide bombers, serial murderers, violent dictators, psycopaths and so on. The vast majority of sensible human beings who meditate on the viability/ethics/practicalities/commercial aspects of software development, eventually conclude that open source is the most effective model for the largest amount of people
No- SCO is a wannabe big, bad company. It is actually a failed Linux vendor (Caldera) from Utah that has decided to litigate its way into profit, while simultaniously boosting share value for its stock holders.
Erm, the idea of using a virus/worm to create multiple launch pads for a massive attack on one target is hardly a new one
Putting aside for one moment the use of the words "clever" and "evil" in this context (because such an attack would be neither), all that would be required is some inventive firewall administration
This possibility has been alive and well for years- dont they give you any reading material in the BBC canteen?
I think the point of the attack, which I personally do not agree with, is to draw attention to a poorly understood yet vitally important legal argument. You do not have to be a particulary malicious person, to find SCOs actions objectionable
you get to help people, meet people, make a difference and have co-workers who might a) be female b)not generally have serious problems socially
A "trojan" does not, by definition, reinfect another machine- it is essentially a "one time" infection. A trojan that propagates would be more correctly termed "virus".
A worm does indeed attack, infect and spread over a network automatically, ergo MyDoom cannot be described as a worm because it spreads by tricking a computer user, and therefore does not reinfect of its own volition
There has been a marked increase in windows fanboys in the last year or so on slashdot, and if most posts are going to be made by non linux/bsd users (and worse, people who have no intention of ever becoming one) then really- what is the point of slashdot?
Did you see the recent(ish) slashdot poll concerning which email program most people use? Outlook won by a mile!! compare that to the previous poll on the same topic from 4 years ago, and it was Pine, with a respectable showing from Mutt. I think that says it all.
Slashdotters have to return to being passionate about linux, sco and open source in general, so that the pseudo geeks who complain about their outlook inbox being clogged on their poorly administered microsoft network will go away. Then the rest of us can get on with discussing the real, interesting issues.
Mr McBride and the media in general- stop calling MyDoom a worm, I know it sounds more dramatic and "computery" than virus, but VIRUS is what it is
see here and elsewhere on the web
Sorry for being negative, but the guy just bugs me.
Some of the points that he brings up from time to time are reasonably interesting, but rarely inspiring or revolutionary.
see here for an overview of the full british honours system
The only group of people who should decide what linux "needs" are the users. Linux development cannot be hijacked by commercial interests.
The most interesting aspect of the demise of UL is what it actually means to we, the linux using public. And what it actually means is not very much at all. Life under the penguin goes on and continues to improve whether these self appointed commercial consortiums exist or not.
In that case isnt the name "Pearl Harbour" completely applicable? ;o)
2)
in 2010 nobody will be using windows3)
This just does not and cannot happen in a heterogeneous IT environment such as the one we have today, and the one that we will have to an even greater extent in 5-10 years. A virus that destroys a win2000 installation is not going to have much effect on a Solaris system, or the other way round. Additionally, important backups are kept in a non-networked environment, for this very reason. The only way that these can (possibly) be taken out is to launch a gradual attack over a long period of time, but such an attack would not go unnoticed over the entire globe without the alarm being raised. Besides the author talks specifically of an instantaneous attack.4)
The authorities have proved startlingly ineffective when it comes to locating the point of origin of attacks in recent years. In the cases where a perpetrator has been (correctly) identified, this has generally been at the perps wishes (confession, inclusion of email address, registered server, IP address etc).5)
Again recent history has shown a remarkable lack of international cooperation when it comes to identifying and extraditing "hackers" (lets not pick up on the misuse of this word here). Additionally, where are you going to apportion for flaws in the open source software that the backbone of the internet mostly runs on today, and will do so almost entirely in the future?6)
There will be a surge in the corporate purchase of such software, but it will be extremely easy to circumnavigateIt runs quite nicley with full resolution/textures/shading on my home machine (P4 2.4, NVidia GForce-1 year old), so I think it would run ok on a P4 1.7 with a 2 year old nvidia, even if it meant screwing down some of the detailing (which you can do from the settings menu in a variety of ways)
vrai- you would benefit greatly from the extraction of your naive head from your privately educated english arse sometime in the future...
1) Talks in grandious terms about his expertise in managing a large open source project (http://leopard.sourceforge.net/) which on closer inspection seems to be empty and unused vapourware
2) homepage (http://www.consultingtimes.com/) is a very recently started blog whos purpose seems to be to establish the author as some kind of authority on Open Source
3) Seems at several points to be making sales pitches towards US local government.
4) The letter from the CIO just doesnt ring true...
conclusion: this seems to be a ropey attempt to establish credability in potential US local government clients by somebody not quite as into Open Source as he would like us (and his potential clients) to believe
if they could only make them run on time that would be even better...
Perhaps the real story here is how far behind the US is in the widespread use of mobile phone technology...
Una rightly describes the "scroll lock" key as having "cursor lock" functionality
She doesnt attribute the "break" (stop/start screen scrolling) functionality to "scroll lock" at all.