The Unix/Linux security model is terrible. Here are just a few of the most painful flaws:
Any process that is owned by a given user has all the authority that that user could have
Some executables allow a process to start other processes with root access. If there's an overflow in any of the numerous suid binaries, any process can use it to escalate.
The most dangerous operations, such as processing network data, require root privileges. I still think that "must be root to bind ports < 1024" is the #1 Unix/Linux security bug and we've been suffering with it for three decades.
There is a user (root) which can access everything in the system. There's no way to grant a program the capability to listen to port 80 without also granting it the capability to write raw blocks on the disk, access raw devices, access other users' files, etc. This is an absolute disaster. No ordinary web server needs the ability to write raw disk blocks, so it shouldn't have the capability to do it.
So yeah, the Unix/Linux security model is such a disaster that he's right! On a single-user machine (such as a typical Linspire machine) the user isn't really any worse off running everything as root.
What would be nice is if someone would actually fix the Unix/Linux security model one of these decades.
I'm sure a lot of Unix old hands (perhaps complete with beards!) will dismiss what I'm saying as rubbish, but I also believe that just being an old Unixer doesn't give anyone any special understanding of security. The way to get a special understanding of security is to think about, and understand, some theory ideas like least-privilege, capabilities, compartmentalization, that kind of thing. All those are foreign to the traditional Unix world, which is based on users and permissions. The users-and-permissions model is the ROT-13 of security models.
That is not an accurate assessment. You don't need to be running OOo as root to get hit. Malware can do plenty of damage without needing root privileges. The biggest piece of damage such a virus could do is... look in the user's mailbox and send itself on to all the email addresses it finds, which just happens to be exactly what all these Outlook viruses do.
The fact that Linux separates users from root won't prevent this hypothetical virus from acting just like a lot of Outlook viruses.
Also, getting someone to open a script is quite different from getting someone to open an OOo document. Most mail readers will present one or more dialog boxes asking "are you sure you want to do this" before they run a script or application, and they will probably have you choose an application to use to open it, whereas most are configured to open up.doc documents without asking anything. It all comes down to MIME types. There is a MIME type that lets Kmail (etc) easily open MS Word documents but there is no MIME type that associates a shell script with the application "/bin/sh", for example. I'm sure some thought was given to security when putting together the MIME types, and no one assumed that OOo would be exploitable like this.
As a side note, this really shows the value of XML-based document formats vs. weird proprietary binary formats (ie, MS Word). You can't exploit software that's based on XML because all such software uses off-the-shelf, open source XML parsers which have been so thoroughly tested, debugged, scrutinized and hammered on that the chances of an overflow are very very low. Also the format is saner and it's easier for a human to write code to parse it.
I'm sure we could learn many useful things from a sample return from Mars, and we might even make some breakthrough discovery, such as discovering microbes, but is this an optimal way to spend money? It seems like there are two very important technologies that we need to develop more of in order for our space efforts to "scale": better propulsion technologies and better autonomous vehicle technologies. Any expenditures that don't help those two goals is just a one-shot benefit, rather than a real contribution to making us a space-capable species.
On the propulsion question, it seems like their plan is to get enough fuel to achieve Mars escape velocity up to Earth escape velocity to get it to the surface of Mars in the first place. It sounds like this is heading towards being just an enormous amount of rocket fuel moving back and forth. I don't see any real advancement in science in us trucking around gargantuan loads of the same old fuels. Sure, it's very expensive and takes a lot of resources, but it's still just rocket science, something we've been doing for decades.
It also doesn't get us any closer to manned missions. It seems like to do a manned Mars mission you need to get enough fuel to the surface of Mars to a) support all the surface activities there and b) lift the astronauts back off the Mars surface and c) lift the astronauts back off the Mars surface. Yes, b) and c) are the same; I don't think anyone would propose sending astronauts over there without a backup lift-off plan. But anyway, when you add up all the fuel in a, b, and c, plus crew habitations and science gear, you end up needing many tons of stuff on the surface of Mars, and it costs something like $10,000/pound to get stuff off of Earth so just the fuel costs alone are going to be mind boggling, and in the end we haven't developed anything new. Just more big rockets.
It seems to me that the whole thing is a pointless waste unless we develop methods of producing fuel on Mars itself, so round-trips can become a more routine thing and we can start thinking about larger probes even further afield.
By the way, the Mac Mini was the most brilliant move Apple has done to get more developers to experiment with the Mac. Hmm, let's see, it costs $600 (out the door), it uses all my existing peripherals, it takes up negligible space on my desk... I'll take one! I'll probably buy one just so that I can make sure that this new educational learning application runs smoothly on OS X 10.4. This Mac Mini could result in a lot more Mac software.
I think the problem is that if you look on the Sun Swing tutorials, they all have a line in them that sets the app to "default look and feel." So everyone puts those lines in his Java app. "Default" must be the correct setting, right? Wrong! Default look and feel means the Java default look and feel, as opposed to the platform-dependent look and feel. The Java LnF is ugly ugly ugly and it works differently from all the other apps on your system. I never adjust the LnF; I'll use whatever the JRE wants to give me. Sun makes a big deal about plugable LnF and being able to switch LnF. I think that's a bug, not a feature. Your app should run with whatever LnF the host environment wants to impose on it, and it should be difficult or impossible to change this.
I'll be putting up some screenshots of my app in the next couple of weeks. If I can find someone who has OS 10.4 I'll even put up some Mac screenshots. I'm very curious to see if Mac users will think of it as a Mac desktop app; I would take that as a compliment, of course.
From what I can tell, there are two things holding Java back from desktop apps. First is that Swing itself is hard to use and cumbersome. It is too powerful and not intuitive enough to program in. Yes it has some great features but there should be simpler, more direct ways of doing common things. Second, Java is closed source. This is a problem because we need forks of the JRE. We need a Qt fork, which does all the rendering in Qt. We need a GTK fork, a Mac fork, etc. These would all have the same language and run the same software but they would use native rendering, which is the only way you're going to get real native LnF, which is the only way you're going to get people to think of Java apps as "just like any other app".
It looks like Apple is still stuck in 1.4-land for now but apparently Tiger is going to ship with 1.5. Can anyone confirm this? If so it's going to be a help to those of us with Java 1.5 applications.
I know, even calling this thing "pathological science" is elevating it over its true status (plain old fraud). I think that a) it is time for Slashdot to create a new category called "pathological science" where people who care about such things can discuss them and laugh at them and b) everyone should read this classic paper about pathological science. Pathological science has quite a few recurring themes and hallmarks which would should all be aware of, and when we see them, we should be extra-skeptical. Note that this paper I linked to is a classic, meaning it was published in the days before the concept of nanotech. I think that talking about nanotech in marketing materials should add an extra helping skepticism to any analysis.
"Lies, lies, damned out lies... Checking your boundaries does cost time, it's not much, but it does cost time. Checking the length of your buffer at compiletime is impossible if you're dealing with a users input (unless you want to limit the length of a string a user can input, or filesize). Checking at execution level means keeping something like an internal counter and throwing an exception. Guess what... That costs CPÜ time. Granted, it's negligable, but it still costs time."
Actually, no, it does not necessarily take any CPU time. Modern CPUs have some very fancy methods of doing branch prediction, which means they can estimate what the likely outcome of an IF statement is, and if they guess correctly, that statement ends up taking no additional time; it just disappears from the loop. And if you are looping through a million values, the branch prediction performed on the array bounds check will probably be correct every time during normal use of the loop, so in fact, the array bounds check ends up being for free!
And, a simple bounds check like: if(pointer > limit) is a single CPU instruction. How long does a single CPU instruction take to execute these days? How much does a faster CPU cost? How much does a security hole cost?
When oh when are we going to learn, you cannot handle untrusted data (data from unknown hosts on the net) using software written with tools that allow dangerous memory access? These exploits have happened once a month for the past twenty years... let's see, in Sendmail, in BIND, in a bunch of browsers, in image processing libraries, in chat programs, in Outlook, on and on. Once a month for TWENTY YEARS! What these vulnerabilities all have in common is that they work on programs written in C. What C has is the ability to overflow buffers because buffers don't know their own size. What the solution is is to only use tools that have safe buffers, where buffer size constraints are enforced at the compiler or execution level. There's no performance penalty inherent in such tools and they make the programmer's job easier. The other component that is needed is a tool-level enforcement that prevents the programmer from directly altering the stack. Finally, all programs should run under the constraints of a capabilities system, so that even if the program is 100% malicious, it can only take actions which are pre-defined by a user. For example a chat program should not have the capability to write sectors on a disk, access network ports beyond its allocated port, execute other code, or write or delete files outside of its directory.
Until things start getting fixed at the tool and OS level we're going to continue having these types of exploits once a month for the NEXT twenty years. If we don't switch from using C this is going to be the Slashdot headline in 2025: "Vulnerability on Microsoft HoloChat allows attackers to take over your nervous system."
If you browse the Eros archives, you can see that Mr. Shapiro (the creator of Eros) makes frequent references to Multics as the inspiration for Eros (and therefore Coyotos). I'm not able to answer that question myself but clearly there is a close connection between Coyotos and Multics.
I hope that Apple will do the smart thing and at least have Oasis (OOo file format) import and export built into this. If they are just using the same old MS formats, they are admitting that they are owned willingly. It's so easy to write third-party tools for searching, comparing, and extracting data from OASIS files that this would fit in with the whole Apple "it just works" idea. Do it Apple!
Also I am a bit surprised that Apple didn't go with an existing software base for their Office suite. It is obvious that what they are doing is a defensive maneouvre against the possibility that MS will drop Apple support for Office, like they did with IE. Apple had to have some non-IE backup plan and they chose to take Konqueror and turn it into Safari. Good choice Apple. But they could have done the same thing with iWorks. There are two code bases they could have picked: the obvious OpenOffice, and also KOffice. Actually KOffice is quite good, considering that it's a "small" project. And if they liked Konqueror then maybe KOffice would have also been appealing to them.
One interesting thing about this is that it is indicating that office software is becoming a commodity. There are currently half a dozen office suites out there (MS Office, iWorks, OOo, SoftMaker, KingSoft, KOffice and probably a few more I'm not remembering right now). I actually hope that iWorks is also ported to Linux, but that seems very very unlikely.
Yes, AAC is controlled in just the same way that MP3 is. When they were designing MPEG4 to replace the aging MPEG2, they also needed a new audio standard. The designed what was called a non-backwards compatible standard, which is AAC. If you want to "fix" MP3, you end up with AAC, which is an excellent standard.
Ok, let me just say that I am a developer implementing an AAC player so I am familiar with it backwards and forwards. I am not at all familiar with MP3 per se so maybe I don't have my facts straight on MP3 itself... but AAC has some amazing features that MP3 doesn't have. Let's see, it has:
Perceptual noise shaping (PNS): Noise can be sent just by labeling it as "noise" without having to accurately encode it.
Temporal noise shaping (TNS): Information can be concentrated where it is needed.
Different window lengths: long vs. short, so that areas where there is rapid signal change can be encoded with more information.
Gain control: Enhance the dynamic range.
Kaiser-Bessel windowing: More optimal than the sine windowing which I think MP3 is limited to. Oh, and it can switch between the two, also.
And that's just a few of them. It also has long-term prediction and so many other things. In fact the worst aspect of AAC is that it's very complicated to implement and if you turn on all these features (like long-term prediction, etc) you end up needing a lot of CPU to play it. But that is the right way to design a standard. Mobile phones three years from now are going to have Pentium II class CPUs standard, I would estimate, so we'll be able to use all the fancy features of AAC. And until then, there is AAC low-complexity.
If you want to learn a lot about AAC, check out the Audiocoding website.
Why are they bothering with this? All the other standards that came after MP3 (AAC/Quicktime, Ogg, WMA) learned from MP3 and improved on it significantly. What's the issue with backward compatibility? Every player out there now can already play better formats.
This is like trying to "improve" a car that's 30 years old when instead you could just have a modern car that doesn't need to be improved. Might be a fun hobby, but doesn't make sense as business idea.
What is the point of this? If you're going to spend all this time and effort on choosing, installing and using anti-spyware tools, maybe it's time to question why spyware exists in the first place? A computer that does things like access data without informing the user isn't performing correctly. Wouldn't it make more sense for users to just upgrade their browser to Firefox, or even better upgrade all the way to Linux, rather than spend so much time messing around with anti-spyware tools that don't work?
But really, how can this guy call a crashed spacecraft an "eyesore"? Has he ever seen a crashed spacecraft?
Anyway, if/when Mars get colonized the whole thing is going to change. There may be some terraforming which means plants, atmosphere, that kind of thing so none of it will be the same.
I have installed Suse 9.2, and the OOo 1.1.3 looks pretty standard on it. I assume the next Suse is going to come with this? Is there an easy way to install this new OOo in Suse 9.2 without breaking everything? This is something Linux needs, badly. OOo is a great system but obviously it's not well integrated with the rest of KDE. If they can really get it integrated with KDE it will be a major step forward for the Linux Desktop.
I'm glad they are developing a biodegradable disk for a format that doesn't really exist yet, but what about some biodegradable disks that we can actually use? How about somehow coming up with a plain old cornstarch or recycled plastic CD-R that I could buy today? Is there such a thing? We already use 100% post-consumer recycled paper, but we would like to use recycled or biomass CD-Rs, too. Any sources for these? Or are we just going to read Slashdot articles about them but never buy them?
Wouldn't it be better to work on some way of getting to Mars faster rather than figuring out ways to go slower? Just showing up on Mars once, making some great quote ("One small step...") and heading home with some rocks seems pointless. It was pointless the last time we pull such a stunt. If we want to get some value out of this, we need to find a way to get to and from the Red Planet quickly. Finding a way to do it without getting bored isn't an advance in the right direction.
I'm a lot more interested in great new nuclear propulsion technologies than figuring out some way to pass the time.
Once we have a quick round-trip propulsion system, routine flights might be possible, opening up all kinds of possibilities.
Also, if we have a powerful propulsion system, it does start opening up even more far-flung expeditions, like unmanned long-term trips outside the solar system even.
Everything that desktop Linux needs is there: a truly great office suite (OOo), several good PIM/mail programs (Evolution, Thunderbird, Kontact), several great web browsers (Firefox, Konqueror, Mozilla, Opera), the ability to run a lot of MS Windows software (Crossover Office), and many other features. There's no lack of software. The problem is lack of seamless user experience.
It's pretty hard to explain to a user who doesn't care about such things why the look-and-feel is so different among the KDE desktop, the Mozilla browser, OpenOffice and Evolution. It's hard to explain the maddening complexity of clipboard issues among these apps. "Oh, you can't cut and paste between X and Y because X is a ___ app, but Y is a ___ app." That's fine for those of us who understand the differences among X, KDE and GTK, but ordinary desktop users shouldn't have to be aware of such things.
Fortunately it looks like there is a project to make OpenOffice fully integrated with KDE/Qt. Also, with both Evolution and Suse now owned by the same company (Novell) hopefully there is going to be some better integration there, too. I was somewhat disappointed when I installed the latest Suse 9.2 that there still is a confusing choice between Kontact and Evolution, and presumably Evolution isn't fully integrated with the KDE desktop, but I expect (hope) these things will be fixed in the next release.
Think more about seamless integration, less about apps. The apps are there! But the user experience is not.
These are my observations as a five-year exclusive desktop Linux user.
If you pre-ordered it directly from the Suse website, they shipped it late last Friday. I got mine on Tuesday. It looks like it's going to be a great system. 9.1 was already excellent. They do still need to smooth out the UI differences between Qt and non-Qt apps, so that, for example, OpenOffice will work the same way that everything else works. It looks like they are moving in that direction. I really think that KDE/Qt is far beyond Windows XP and is up there with Mac OS X, but the problem is that non-KDE apps break the seamless experience aspect of it. Have fun.
I wonder why MS doesn't get its Server 2003 Unix-certified. If they really want to break into the server business, that would be a logical thing for them to do, and they have the resources to do it. Yes, funny as it sounds, there's no reason why Windows Server 2003 couldn't become an officially-certified Unix, just like Linux could if someone bothered to take it through the certification process.
They are talking about how important this could be for regions without good access to clean water, and in the end, someone mentions a UV light sterilization system that's much cheaper. One thing I've always wondered: why not use plain old gamma rays to treat water? We have no shortage of powerful gamma ray emitters around. Once the gamma ray emitter is set up, it powers itself for a long time. It sterilizes everything. Piping water through some type of irradiation system seems like it would really sterilize it at a very low cost, and yet I've never heard of such a system.
Of course there are safety concerns. If some of the radio isotopes managed to get into the water as it went past, that would be bad. Fortunately, it's not hard to contain such things, and also, it's very easy to monitor the outgoing water to see if there is any leak of radioactive materials.
It just seems to make sense but I've never heard of such a system in use.
Slashdot Mirror
- Any process that is owned by a given user has all the authority that that user could have
- Some executables allow a process to start other processes with root access. If there's an overflow in any of the numerous suid binaries, any process can use it to escalate.
- The most dangerous operations, such as processing network data, require root privileges. I still think that "must be root to bind ports < 1024" is the #1 Unix/Linux security bug and we've been suffering with it for three decades.
- There is a user (root) which can access everything in the system. There's no way to grant a program the capability to listen to port 80 without also granting it the capability to write raw blocks on the disk, access raw devices, access other users' files, etc. This is an absolute disaster. No ordinary web server needs the ability to write raw disk blocks, so it shouldn't have the capability to do it.
So yeah, the Unix/Linux security model is such a disaster that he's right! On a single-user machine (such as a typical Linspire machine) the user isn't really any worse off running everything as root.What would be nice is if someone would actually fix the Unix/Linux security model one of these decades.
I'm sure a lot of Unix old hands (perhaps complete with beards!) will dismiss what I'm saying as rubbish, but I also believe that just being an old Unixer doesn't give anyone any special understanding of security. The way to get a special understanding of security is to think about, and understand, some theory ideas like least-privilege, capabilities, compartmentalization, that kind of thing. All those are foreign to the traditional Unix world, which is based on users and permissions. The users-and-permissions model is the ROT-13 of security models.
The fact that Linux separates users from root won't prevent this hypothetical virus from acting just like a lot of Outlook viruses.
Also, getting someone to open a script is quite different from getting someone to open an OOo document. Most mail readers will present one or more dialog boxes asking "are you sure you want to do this" before they run a script or application, and they will probably have you choose an application to use to open it, whereas most are configured to open up .doc documents without asking anything. It all comes down to MIME types. There is a MIME type that lets Kmail (etc) easily open MS Word documents but there is no MIME type that associates a shell script with the application "/bin/sh", for example. I'm sure some thought was given to security when putting together the MIME types, and no one assumed that OOo would be exploitable like this.
As a side note, this really shows the value of XML-based document formats vs. weird proprietary binary formats (ie, MS Word). You can't exploit software that's based on XML because all such software uses off-the-shelf, open source XML parsers which have been so thoroughly tested, debugged, scrutinized and hammered on that the chances of an overflow are very very low. Also the format is saner and it's easier for a human to write code to parse it.
On the propulsion question, it seems like their plan is to get enough fuel to achieve Mars escape velocity up to Earth escape velocity to get it to the surface of Mars in the first place. It sounds like this is heading towards being just an enormous amount of rocket fuel moving back and forth. I don't see any real advancement in science in us trucking around gargantuan loads of the same old fuels. Sure, it's very expensive and takes a lot of resources, but it's still just rocket science, something we've been doing for decades.
It also doesn't get us any closer to manned missions. It seems like to do a manned Mars mission you need to get enough fuel to the surface of Mars to a) support all the surface activities there and b) lift the astronauts back off the Mars surface and c) lift the astronauts back off the Mars surface. Yes, b) and c) are the same; I don't think anyone would propose sending astronauts over there without a backup lift-off plan. But anyway, when you add up all the fuel in a, b, and c, plus crew habitations and science gear, you end up needing many tons of stuff on the surface of Mars, and it costs something like $10,000/pound to get stuff off of Earth so just the fuel costs alone are going to be mind boggling, and in the end we haven't developed anything new. Just more big rockets.
It seems to me that the whole thing is a pointless waste unless we develop methods of producing fuel on Mars itself, so round-trips can become a more routine thing and we can start thinking about larger probes even further afield.
NB, I am not a rocket scientist.
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Educational software
By the way, the Mac Mini was the most brilliant move Apple has done to get more developers to experiment with the Mac. Hmm, let's see, it costs $600 (out the door), it uses all my existing peripherals, it takes up negligible space on my desk... I'll take one! I'll probably buy one just so that I can make sure that this new educational learning application runs smoothly on OS X 10.4. This Mac Mini could result in a lot more Mac software.
I'll be putting up some screenshots of my app in the next couple of weeks. If I can find someone who has OS 10.4 I'll even put up some Mac screenshots. I'm very curious to see if Mac users will think of it as a Mac desktop app; I would take that as a compliment, of course.
From what I can tell, there are two things holding Java back from desktop apps. First is that Swing itself is hard to use and cumbersome. It is too powerful and not intuitive enough to program in. Yes it has some great features but there should be simpler, more direct ways of doing common things. Second, Java is closed source. This is a problem because we need forks of the JRE. We need a Qt fork, which does all the rendering in Qt. We need a GTK fork, a Mac fork, etc. These would all have the same language and run the same software but they would use native rendering, which is the only way you're going to get real native LnF, which is the only way you're going to get people to think of Java apps as "just like any other app".
It looks like Apple is still stuck in 1.4-land for now but apparently Tiger is going to ship with 1.5. Can anyone confirm this? If so it's going to be a help to those of us with Java 1.5 applications.
I know, even calling this thing "pathological science" is elevating it over its true status (plain old fraud). I think that a) it is time for Slashdot to create a new category called "pathological science" where people who care about such things can discuss them and laugh at them and b) everyone should read this classic paper about pathological science. Pathological science has quite a few recurring themes and hallmarks which would should all be aware of, and when we see them, we should be extra-skeptical. Note that this paper I linked to is a classic, meaning it was published in the days before the concept of nanotech. I think that talking about nanotech in marketing materials should add an extra helping skepticism to any analysis.
Actually, no, it does not necessarily take any CPU time. Modern CPUs have some very fancy methods of doing branch prediction, which means they can estimate what the likely outcome of an IF statement is, and if they guess correctly, that statement ends up taking no additional time; it just disappears from the loop. And if you are looping through a million values, the branch prediction performed on the array bounds check will probably be correct every time during normal use of the loop, so in fact, the array bounds check ends up being for free!
And, a simple bounds check like: if(pointer > limit) is a single CPU instruction. How long does a single CPU instruction take to execute these days? How much does a faster CPU cost? How much does a security hole cost?
Until things start getting fixed at the tool and OS level we're going to continue having these types of exploits once a month for the NEXT twenty years. If we don't switch from using C this is going to be the Slashdot headline in 2025: "Vulnerability on Microsoft HoloChat allows attackers to take over your nervous system."
If you browse the Eros archives, you can see that Mr. Shapiro (the creator of Eros) makes frequent references to Multics as the inspiration for Eros (and therefore Coyotos). I'm not able to answer that question myself but clearly there is a close connection between Coyotos and Multics.
Can it generate songs which are cross-format focused and guaranteed to break on radio based on state-of-the-art marketing technology?
Also I am a bit surprised that Apple didn't go with an existing software base for their Office suite. It is obvious that what they are doing is a defensive maneouvre against the possibility that MS will drop Apple support for Office, like they did with IE. Apple had to have some non-IE backup plan and they chose to take Konqueror and turn it into Safari. Good choice Apple. But they could have done the same thing with iWorks. There are two code bases they could have picked: the obvious OpenOffice, and also KOffice. Actually KOffice is quite good, considering that it's a "small" project. And if they liked Konqueror then maybe KOffice would have also been appealing to them.
One interesting thing about this is that it is indicating that office software is becoming a commodity. There are currently half a dozen office suites out there (MS Office, iWorks, OOo, SoftMaker, KingSoft, KOffice and probably a few more I'm not remembering right now). I actually hope that iWorks is also ported to Linux, but that seems very very unlikely.
Ok, let me just say that I am a developer implementing an AAC player so I am familiar with it backwards and forwards. I am not at all familiar with MP3 per se so maybe I don't have my facts straight on MP3 itself... but AAC has some amazing features that MP3 doesn't have. Let's see, it has:
And that's just a few of them. It also has long-term prediction and so many other things. In fact the worst aspect of AAC is that it's very complicated to implement and if you turn on all these features (like long-term prediction, etc) you end up needing a lot of CPU to play it. But that is the right way to design a standard. Mobile phones three years from now are going to have Pentium II class CPUs standard, I would estimate, so we'll be able to use all the fancy features of AAC. And until then, there is AAC low-complexity.
If you want to learn a lot about AAC, check out the Audiocoding website.
This is like trying to "improve" a car that's 30 years old when instead you could just have a modern car that doesn't need to be improved. Might be a fun hobby, but doesn't make sense as business idea.
What is the point of this? If you're going to spend all this time and effort on choosing, installing and using anti-spyware tools, maybe it's time to question why spyware exists in the first place? A computer that does things like access data without informing the user isn't performing correctly. Wouldn't it make more sense for users to just upgrade their browser to Firefox, or even better upgrade all the way to Linux, rather than spend so much time messing around with anti-spyware tools that don't work?
Anyway, if/when Mars get colonized the whole thing is going to change. There may be some terraforming which means plants, atmosphere, that kind of thing so none of it will be the same.
I have installed Suse 9.2, and the OOo 1.1.3 looks pretty standard on it. I assume the next Suse is going to come with this? Is there an easy way to install this new OOo in Suse 9.2 without breaking everything? This is something Linux needs, badly. OOo is a great system but obviously it's not well integrated with the rest of KDE. If they can really get it integrated with KDE it will be a major step forward for the Linux Desktop.
Lisa: "But isn't that a bit shortsited? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?"
Skinner: "No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards."
Lisa: "But aren't the snakes even worse?"
Skinner: "Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat."
Lisa: "But then we're stuck with gorillas!"
Skinner: "No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death."
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Create a WAP server
419 Eater is one of the funniest sites on the net. Check it out when you need a good laugh.
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Create a WAP server
I'm a lot more interested in great new nuclear propulsion technologies than figuring out some way to pass the time.
Once we have a quick round-trip propulsion system, routine flights might be possible, opening up all kinds of possibilities.
Also, if we have a powerful propulsion system, it does start opening up even more far-flung expeditions, like unmanned long-term trips outside the solar system even.
Of course, IANARS.
It's pretty hard to explain to a user who doesn't care about such things why the look-and-feel is so different among the KDE desktop, the Mozilla browser, OpenOffice and Evolution. It's hard to explain the maddening complexity of clipboard issues among these apps. "Oh, you can't cut and paste between X and Y because X is a ___ app, but Y is a ___ app." That's fine for those of us who understand the differences among X, KDE and GTK, but ordinary desktop users shouldn't have to be aware of such things.
Fortunately it looks like there is a project to make OpenOffice fully integrated with KDE/Qt. Also, with both Evolution and Suse now owned by the same company (Novell) hopefully there is going to be some better integration there, too. I was somewhat disappointed when I installed the latest Suse 9.2 that there still is a confusing choice between Kontact and Evolution, and presumably Evolution isn't fully integrated with the KDE desktop, but I expect (hope) these things will be fixed in the next release.
Think more about seamless integration, less about apps. The apps are there! But the user experience is not.
These are my observations as a five-year exclusive desktop Linux user.
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Create a WAP server
Of course there are safety concerns. If some of the radio isotopes managed to get into the water as it went past, that would be bad. Fortunately, it's not hard to contain such things, and also, it's very easy to monitor the outgoing water to see if there is any leak of radioactive materials.
It just seems to make sense but I've never heard of such a system in use.