How does Xen perform for graphics-intensive stuff? Usually where virtualization bas its biggest problems is when it's trying to use devices. But I'm never quite straight on everything with Xen; does the dom0 incur a performance hit when executing privledged instructions or not?
Even if he had all the money in South Africa Shuttleworth couldn't get a DVD/CSS license or an MP3 patent license that he could apply to open-source software. He could get a license for a closed-source player and distribute that; it probably could not be redistributable because such licenses surely would not allow that. Linspire has a closed-source DVD player (http://www.linspire.com/lindows_products_details. php?product_id=11804) that Linspire users can buy for forty bucks. Of course if Linspire *could* make an open and legal DVD player they probably wouldn't.
That doesn't sound like a bad idea. Your OS might be exploitable, but have some layer underneath it that is small, perfectly secure, and transparent to everything running on top (which is exactly what the potential virus would have to be). The virus would have a hard time hiding itself from both the lower and higher level. At a "from 10,000 feet" view, this solution provides a similar kind of protection as a hardware Trusted Computing Module; unfortunately this solution takes a bigger performance hit.
As I see it, one of the big design challenges for either a good Trusted Computing system is creating a way for users to enable it, and to let it know when they really do want to make major operating system-level changes that it would ordinarily prevent. How does a Trusted Computing system distinguish conclusively between an OS upgrade and a rootkit? It can certainly take hints, but I think that one way or another it will have to "trust" packages signed by the "proper" companies, and nothing else. And that's a real shame... I mean, I have tried to think of various scenarios where a user could have real control over TC-style functionality, but in my mind it always becomes exploitable in the hands of a user that can be fooled. And most users can be fooled at least some of the time. I don't at all like the idea that to be most sure of my security I have to lock myself in to some external provider, but it might really be the case.
I don't know a whole lot about the way Photoshop works, so enlighten me: does Photoshop (or any Windows program, for that matter) have any control over when its pages are swapped out to disk, and which pages those are? I wasn't aware that programs could do that.
When copyright runs out the files will still be encrypted and only playable with the properly-licenced software. That's just one of the ways that DRM shifts the balance of power far too strongly on the side of media corporations and why I don't consider it a good deal to invest in DRM media.
One thing that some people miss when talking about old hardware and operating systems is the following: if you run a scaled-down distro on an old computer you can still get all the security updates for the packages you install. You can run all modern software if you want and have much more confidence in the security of your system. you just can't run resource-intensive software, modern or old. In fact, it's not just security, as many programs improve their functionality from version to version without becoming much more heavy. I would have listed vim as an example, but it is getting pretty big these days... though you can turn off most of the features you don't want.
Windows doesn't give you the choice, at least not without a fight. It's either modern and resource-intensive or light and outdated. Now, of course, if Linux starts dropping tons of old hardware support then the situation changes completely; then you're at the mercy of devlelopers keeping interest in backporting security fixes to the 2.4 branch, just as with Windows you're at the mercy of Microsoft backporting their security fixes to whatever old version of Windows you're running.
It looks like a 3x3 grid, but the middle button is inactive (in the game you stand in the middle in order to not press anything, which is useful during menu selection). You really wouldn't want to use select and start for normal letters in my opinion as a mediocre DDR player, because they are small and out of the way of your feet.
Also as a mediocre DDR player, I think that DDR is way too slow to be used as an input device for text. Consider how fast you can move your fingers and then think if you had to play DDR that quickly with every step being a double. This is a problem because most people already think much faster than they type. I have had to type one-handed briefly after having wrist surgery, and I've also tried to fashion my remote (one of those ATi thingies) into a typing device. Both input methods were annoyingly slow, though I did get pretty good at one-handed typing for a while. But if you were going to do it, I'd suggest using a text processor with word completion (OpenOffice 1.1 did this, I haven't used to new version much to see if they still do) and devoting chords to the most common words like "the", "an", etc. Also make the backspace key very easy to press, though it probably could not be just one button as if you only have 8 buttons reserving one for any particular function would result in only 42 remaining combinations. You'd also need to come up with a way to do control keys, which would probably look a lot like sticky keys.
Meh. Too much effort for not much gain, in my opinion.
I have no idea how good read logging is. I would think that if all reads were logged, and it at some point became clear that certain documents were leaked, that it would be possible by searching logs to find who had accessed those documents. It wouldn't be much use if the files were leaked by someone that had a good reason to access them, but then again, who does?
I imagine if some thought was put into it it wouldn't be that hard to set up some logging rules that would flag behavior that looked like scanning a network for files. It's entirely possible it's already been done and I just don't know about it.
There's nothing you could do with the iPod that you couldn't do with your normal computer and any random external hard drive. And your access will be logged (or not logged) just the same as if you'd just run some normal program. What's the big deal that an iPod can do it?
If you can't take your cell phone into work, here's an idea: check the voicemail when you get in the car! I don't know what you're hoping for from the technology if you're not even around your phone most of the day. Do you want an automated ringer that goes off every day at 5:30 reminding you to check your voicemail? It's called a damn alarm clock. They make watches with them these days.
Why increase your reliance on complicated technology when you can easily get what you need without it? And furthermore, if you can't have your cell phone with you for the large part of the day, what's the point of having it in the first place? If you have a 30-minute drive to work all it means is that you get all your voicemails 30 minutes earlier than if you just had the phone at home.
LaTeX tutoring? Hell, I consider myself a pretty knowledgeable Unixhead, but even I don't use LaTeX if I need to create a document quickly.
I use LyX (www.lyx.org) for that. All of the good-lookingness of LaTeX, most of the flexibility, no cryptic syntax error messages. And the best and best-integrated graphical equation editor I've ever seen.
You say "The only meaningful contract language left will be bandwidth limits and volume of data traffic per billing cycle. And if you think about it, that's all the ISPs really care about anyways."?
I don't buy it.
I live in an apartment with a central Internet connction. We're all behind NAT. There is a server clause. I've asked if I could have a couple ports forwarded to my machine for SSH/SFTP and been rejected. It's an absolutely piddling amount of bandwidth (I'd use it perhaps a couple times a week to transfer a few LaTeX or C files that I had forgotten to transfer before going to classes). A few things dawned on me:
If I really want to run a server, and can't under the current agreement, I have to "upgrade" to a "higher" level of service. This "higher" level of service would be more expensive and I would use only a tiny fraction of the bandwidth provided. These companies also tell you that you "can only have one computer connected at a time" (so you don't try to install a router). Of course, it's only physically possible to have one computer connected at a time; in my case, that computer is called a "router". Other computers connect to the router and make requests, which the router fulfills, sometimes my making further requests over the ISP's network. They can't fool me, but they can fool other people, like a poor schmo I talked to that pays for two Internet lines a month so he can run an IP-enabled security camera.
Bandwidth, latency and supply of IP addresses are the costs for an ISP, and they are also the goods that they deliver to us. People like us realize this and will use them to whatever potential we're technically allowed. But you can bet they'll try to profit on selling "upgraded", "business class" service to anyone they can, or by pushing users wanting to post their own content onto limited ad-supported "portal" servers rather than taking control of their own. And of course, they have every stake in presenting the Internet to future generations in this light of a client-only service for most of its members.
Beyond the typical argument that smoking can impair your health and cause you to take more sick days, I'm sure that smoking in excess could cause you to be temporarily unproductive. Just as eating too much sugar at lunch could impair your concentration. Or if you did a 10-mile run all-out over your lunch break you'd probably lose productivity in the afternoon.
On the other hand, eating reasonably will give you energy. A nice little jog or walk over the lunch break can be refreshing. Most smokers aren't going to smoke their way into immediate unproductivity. And you can drink in such a way as not to impair your work also. Supposedly Karl Marx wrote while drinking very slowly and evenly, very late at night (alcohol in small quantities helps you stay awake). Regardless of any "no wonder socialism is such a joke, it was just a drunken rant!" quips this might spur, I've personally tried it while coding late at night and had a very productive and enjoyable session.
Anything *can* impair your work (and your life), and most things will if you do them in excess. That doesn't make them automatically evil.
I wouldn't call it rare for piracy to help a company. If what I read on Slashdot is true, Microsoft was pretty permissive about people installing early versions of Office from work onto their home computers. How many households with multiple computers actually have proper licenses for all the copies of Office and Windows they run? Many computers sold with WinME are still in heavy use and running XP five-finger-discount edition these days. You think Microsoft would rather those computers be running something else?
As T-Rex from Dino Comix (www.qwantz.com) says, "I just have a healthy sense of self-cynicism".
But really, this post is just an excuse to say, "Hey, look, it's another person that posts (or at least appears to) on Slashdot using his real name! How about that?"
In addition to what VGPowerLord said in my older-sibling post, is "running as admin and occasionally running programs with a reduced permissions" really a sane model for user-level security?
At any rate, sudo can be used to reduce permissions as well:
aldimond@talkingcookie ~/randomdocs $ touch foo aldimond@talkingcookie ~/randomdocs $ ls -l foo -rw-r--r-- 1 aldimond users 0 Feb 3 22:30 foo aldimond@talkingcookie ~/randomdocs $ sudo -u awd touch foo Password: (here I enter my user password for the account "aldimond") touch: cannot touch `foo': Permission denied
The other really nice thing about sudo (I honestly don't know whether this is the case with RunAs or not) is that things you do while sudo'ed are logged as being done by the user you're logged in as, not the one you sudo'ed to. This probably doesn't make any difference on single-user systems, but it is the right thing anyhow.
This is a great comment, and it illustrates something important: RMS and the GNU project have always had revolutionary goals. They created the GPLv2 (I don't know what v1 was like) and it resonated with a lot of people that had all kinds of different goals. The goals have always been different but people haven't had to think about this until now that GPLv3 is trying to more completely express the GNU project's crusade.
It is very likely that the GPLv3 will fail to resonate with a lot of the GPLv2's supporters. It's interesting that Linus, for example, talks about RedHat and trying to create a secure system through signed packages and modules. It does look like the GPLv3 will forbid this type of system. RMS has said that he doesn't care about creating "the best" operating system or a "secure" operating system, just a free one. If RMS "takes all his toys and goes home" by forbidding the new versions of GNU tools to be placed under such a system he might inspire a massive fork of the entire body of GPLv2-licensed GNU tools. Many members of the FOSS community have seemingly already appropriated GNU code and licenses, originally written with Stallmanesque goals, to create the "best" or "most secure" operating system they can. Until this point they've been able to collaborate with the Stallmanites despite this. Maybe they'll have to consciously make their own crusade now, as parent says. That could either be a fun, rousing and productivity-sapping discussion, or just a bunch of people agreeing to put aside their differences and share under GPLv2 or some similar license.
I always thought that in order to "Run As" you needed the password of the user you were going to run as. Anyone on Windows right now that can test this? The beauty of sudo is that you can specify the additional permissions that each user can temporarily grant itself in the/etc/sudoers file, and then to get them they only have to authenticate as themselves. This means that you don't have to give out your root password, and that you can flexibly manage the permissions of each user if you choose to do so.
There have been plenty of buffer overrun vulnerabilities allowing potential arbitrary code execution on all major operating systems. There have been plenty of priviledge escalation vulnerabilities on all major operating systems. All you need to get from there to a real exploit is either (a) a vulnerable server listening on some port or (b) some user to click on the wrong link or open the wrong attachment.
90s Outlook had lots of problems. 90s IE had lots of problems. There's a big problem with user accounts on Windows and how difficult it is to run as non-admin. And Windows doesn't have effective tools like sudo to grant occasional privledges beyond the usual. These tools can be built onto Windows. Third-party developers can be pressured to release software that works with the security model. Exploits can be patched, and quality control can be improved. And there are a lot of people working for Microsoft on these very things.
Microsoft may never fully win the battle against hackers. But then again, I don't know if anyone ever can. Even OpenBSD has had security holes in its default install a few times, and it's fighting a much less malicious group of hackers than Windows is. I love using GNU/Linux; it's cool that Unix has had sudo since 1980 and a tradition of sane security practices. That doesn't mean we should get arrogant about security.
An ISP can try to give its customers a better experience, it can huff and puff and look tough. But blocking mailing lists won't stop actual spam. Spam is sent out by zombie machines. Random, short-lived little mail servers in random residential IP blocks.
E-mail lists work in a way that blogs and "yahoo groups" and stuff can't. Let's say I want to receive a newsletter that's sent whenever there's news. Once a week on average, sometimes more, sometimes less. I don't want to have to remember to check a web page all the time to see if there's news. I don't want to check it once weekly and find that they updated on an irregular day earlier in the week for a breaking announcement that I missed. I want that content to be pushed to me so I can read it if it's there as I take my afternoon tea, along with all the other news I read in that way.
You can go and reinvent the wheel, come up with another way to push content onto your users. If it gets popular enough it will be spammed. And yet there will still be a need to push content. Or maybe you could try something like RSS, if you wanted to install and set up a server that would be hit up every hour by whatever fraction of your users decided to even try "that newfangled RSS thing". Newsgroups are designed for just this purpose, but they of course have their own spam problems and many users don't know how to use them.
Or maybe AOL should just drop their arrogance, admit that spam is a difficult problem for which they have no better answer than anyone else, and start behaving with a level of responsibility corresponding to the effect they have on the Internet community.
Perhaps among developers at Google (along with many other places) CNN Money would be a pretty backwater news site compared to Slashdot. This might be even more true in a communist country. Though I suspect that not much of either site makes it through the firewall.
Or maybe I'm just projecting my own geekiness and apathy about the "financial news" onto technologists worldwide.
There are a number of reasons that might be the case, such as the way bootscripts are done and what types of services are started. My desktop machine is an Athlon XP 2100+ with a gig of RAM running Gentoo and it boots to a command prompt significantly slower than my laptop, which is a P3 700, 192MB RAM, running FreeBSD.
Obviously the laptop has a much simpler hardware config, less services that it needs to run, and because I reboot it fairly often I actually bothered to clean out the rc files. In Gentoo at least I know that I want all those things started. With FC you might be probing parts of the hardware config that you have hard-configured into Gentoo, or starting sendmail, more hefty logging facilities, automounters or whatever. Actually, it wouldn't surprise me if FreeBSD's bootscripts are lighter-weight than Gentoo's in general.
I'm not discounting the booting speed advantage of Gentoo over, say, FC or Ubuntu. But take that Gentoo machine and make it run everything that FC runs on startup, and I bet a lot of the advantage goes away. Boot speed won't really tell you much about how the system will perform other tasks (as you can imagine, other than booting my laptop is much, much slower than my desktop).
Think about the amount of money that people make per hour at a tech company like Microsoft. The time they would spend deciding whether or not to make that sale would cost them more than $40-$100.
Look, I run plenty of software that's "version 0.3" and marked "EXPERIMENTAL, USE AT OWN RISK"; I run GNU/Linux and that goes with the territory (well at the moment I'm posting from FreeBSD and it goes a bit less with the territory there). But if you depend on some software for your career you might want something a bit more proven.
Slashdot Mirror
How does Xen perform for graphics-intensive stuff? Usually where virtualization bas its biggest problems is when it's trying to use devices. But I'm never quite straight on everything with Xen; does the dom0 incur a performance hit when executing privledged instructions or not?
Even if he had all the money in South Africa Shuttleworth couldn't get a DVD/CSS license or an MP3 patent license that he could apply to open-source software. He could get a license for a closed-source player and distribute that; it probably could not be redistributable because such licenses surely would not allow that. Linspire has a closed-source DVD player (http://www.linspire.com/lindows_products_details. php?product_id=11804) that Linspire users can buy for forty bucks. Of course if Linspire *could* make an open and legal DVD player they probably wouldn't.
That doesn't sound like a bad idea. Your OS might be exploitable, but have some layer underneath it that is small, perfectly secure, and transparent to everything running on top (which is exactly what the potential virus would have to be). The virus would have a hard time hiding itself from both the lower and higher level. At a "from 10,000 feet" view, this solution provides a similar kind of protection as a hardware Trusted Computing Module; unfortunately this solution takes a bigger performance hit.
As I see it, one of the big design challenges for either a good Trusted Computing system is creating a way for users to enable it, and to let it know when they really do want to make major operating system-level changes that it would ordinarily prevent. How does a Trusted Computing system distinguish conclusively between an OS upgrade and a rootkit? It can certainly take hints, but I think that one way or another it will have to "trust" packages signed by the "proper" companies, and nothing else. And that's a real shame... I mean, I have tried to think of various scenarios where a user could have real control over TC-style functionality, but in my mind it always becomes exploitable in the hands of a user that can be fooled. And most users can be fooled at least some of the time. I don't at all like the idea that to be most sure of my security I have to lock myself in to some external provider, but it might really be the case.
I don't know a whole lot about the way Photoshop works, so enlighten me: does Photoshop (or any Windows program, for that matter) have any control over when its pages are swapped out to disk, and which pages those are? I wasn't aware that programs could do that.
When copyright runs out the files will still be encrypted and only playable with the properly-licenced software. That's just one of the ways that DRM shifts the balance of power far too strongly on the side of media corporations and why I don't consider it a good deal to invest in DRM media.
One thing that some people miss when talking about old hardware and operating systems is the following: if you run a scaled-down distro on an old computer you can still get all the security updates for the packages you install. You can run all modern software if you want and have much more confidence in the security of your system. you just can't run resource-intensive software, modern or old. In fact, it's not just security, as many programs improve their functionality from version to version without becoming much more heavy. I would have listed vim as an example, but it is getting pretty big these days... though you can turn off most of the features you don't want.
Windows doesn't give you the choice, at least not without a fight. It's either modern and resource-intensive or light and outdated. Now, of course, if Linux starts dropping tons of old hardware support then the situation changes completely; then you're at the mercy of devlelopers keeping interest in backporting security fixes to the 2.4 branch, just as with Windows you're at the mercy of Microsoft backporting their security fixes to whatever old version of Windows you're running.
It looks like a 3x3 grid, but the middle button is inactive (in the game you stand in the middle in order to not press anything, which is useful during menu selection). You really wouldn't want to use select and start for normal letters in my opinion as a mediocre DDR player, because they are small and out of the way of your feet.
Also as a mediocre DDR player, I think that DDR is way too slow to be used as an input device for text. Consider how fast you can move your fingers and then think if you had to play DDR that quickly with every step being a double. This is a problem because most people already think much faster than they type. I have had to type one-handed briefly after having wrist surgery, and I've also tried to fashion my remote (one of those ATi thingies) into a typing device. Both input methods were annoyingly slow, though I did get pretty good at one-handed typing for a while. But if you were going to do it, I'd suggest using a text processor with word completion (OpenOffice 1.1 did this, I haven't used to new version much to see if they still do) and devoting chords to the most common words like "the", "an", etc. Also make the backspace key very easy to press, though it probably could not be just one button as if you only have 8 buttons reserving one for any particular function would result in only 42 remaining combinations. You'd also need to come up with a way to do control keys, which would probably look a lot like sticky keys.
Meh. Too much effort for not much gain, in my opinion.
I have no idea how good read logging is. I would think that if all reads were logged, and it at some point became clear that certain documents were leaked, that it would be possible by searching logs to find who had accessed those documents. It wouldn't be much use if the files were leaked by someone that had a good reason to access them, but then again, who does?
I imagine if some thought was put into it it wouldn't be that hard to set up some logging rules that would flag behavior that looked like scanning a network for files. It's entirely possible it's already been done and I just don't know about it.
There's nothing you could do with the iPod that you couldn't do with your normal computer and any random external hard drive. And your access will be logged (or not logged) just the same as if you'd just run some normal program. What's the big deal that an iPod can do it?
If you can't take your cell phone into work, here's an idea: check the voicemail when you get in the car! I don't know what you're hoping for from the technology if you're not even around your phone most of the day. Do you want an automated ringer that goes off every day at 5:30 reminding you to check your voicemail? It's called a damn alarm clock. They make watches with them these days.
Why increase your reliance on complicated technology when you can easily get what you need without it? And furthermore, if you can't have your cell phone with you for the large part of the day, what's the point of having it in the first place? If you have a 30-minute drive to work all it means is that you get all your voicemails 30 minutes earlier than if you just had the phone at home.
LaTeX tutoring? Hell, I consider myself a pretty knowledgeable Unixhead, but even I don't use LaTeX if I need to create a document quickly.
I use LyX (www.lyx.org) for that. All of the good-lookingness of LaTeX, most of the flexibility, no cryptic syntax error messages. And the best and best-integrated graphical equation editor I've ever seen.
You say "The only meaningful contract language left will be bandwidth limits and volume of data traffic per billing cycle. And if you think about it, that's all the ISPs really care about anyways."?
I don't buy it.
I live in an apartment with a central Internet connction. We're all behind NAT. There is a server clause. I've asked if I could have a couple ports forwarded to my machine for SSH/SFTP and been rejected. It's an absolutely piddling amount of bandwidth (I'd use it perhaps a couple times a week to transfer a few LaTeX or C files that I had forgotten to transfer before going to classes). A few things dawned on me:
If I really want to run a server, and can't under the current agreement, I have to "upgrade" to a "higher" level of service. This "higher" level of service would be more expensive and I would use only a tiny fraction of the bandwidth provided. These companies also tell you that you "can only have one computer connected at a time" (so you don't try to install a router). Of course, it's only physically possible to have one computer connected at a time; in my case, that computer is called a "router". Other computers connect to the router and make requests, which the router fulfills, sometimes my making further requests over the ISP's network. They can't fool me, but they can fool other people, like a poor schmo I talked to that pays for two Internet lines a month so he can run an IP-enabled security camera.
Bandwidth, latency and supply of IP addresses are the costs for an ISP, and they are also the goods that they deliver to us. People like us realize this and will use them to whatever potential we're technically allowed. But you can bet they'll try to profit on selling "upgraded", "business class" service to anyone they can, or by pushing users wanting to post their own content onto limited ad-supported "portal" servers rather than taking control of their own. And of course, they have every stake in presenting the Internet to future generations in this light of a client-only service for most of its members.
Beyond the typical argument that smoking can impair your health and cause you to take more sick days, I'm sure that smoking in excess could cause you to be temporarily unproductive. Just as eating too much sugar at lunch could impair your concentration. Or if you did a 10-mile run all-out over your lunch break you'd probably lose productivity in the afternoon.
On the other hand, eating reasonably will give you energy. A nice little jog or walk over the lunch break can be refreshing. Most smokers aren't going to smoke their way into immediate unproductivity. And you can drink in such a way as not to impair your work also. Supposedly Karl Marx wrote while drinking very slowly and evenly, very late at night (alcohol in small quantities helps you stay awake). Regardless of any "no wonder socialism is such a joke, it was just a drunken rant!" quips this might spur, I've personally tried it while coding late at night and had a very productive and enjoyable session.
Anything *can* impair your work (and your life), and most things will if you do them in excess. That doesn't make them automatically evil.
What's your point? It's obnoxious when GNU does it, it's obnoxious when DEC does it and its obnoxious when Microsoft does it.
I wouldn't call it rare for piracy to help a company. If what I read on Slashdot is true, Microsoft was pretty permissive about people installing early versions of Office from work onto their home computers. How many households with multiple computers actually have proper licenses for all the copies of Office and Windows they run? Many computers sold with WinME are still in heavy use and running XP five-finger-discount edition these days. You think Microsoft would rather those computers be running something else?
As T-Rex from Dino Comix (www.qwantz.com) says, "I just have a healthy sense of self-cynicism".
But really, this post is just an excuse to say, "Hey, look, it's another person that posts (or at least appears to) on Slashdot using his real name! How about that?"
In addition to what VGPowerLord said in my older-sibling post, is "running as admin and occasionally running programs with a reduced permissions" really a sane model for user-level security?
At any rate, sudo can be used to reduce permissions as well:
aldimond@talkingcookie ~/randomdocs $ touch foo
aldimond@talkingcookie ~/randomdocs $ ls -l foo
-rw-r--r-- 1 aldimond users 0 Feb 3 22:30 foo
aldimond@talkingcookie ~/randomdocs $ sudo -u awd touch foo
Password: (here I enter my user password for the account "aldimond")
touch: cannot touch `foo': Permission denied
The other really nice thing about sudo (I honestly don't know whether this is the case with RunAs or not) is that things you do while sudo'ed are logged as being done by the user you're logged in as, not the one you sudo'ed to. This probably doesn't make any difference on single-user systems, but it is the right thing anyhow.
This is a great comment, and it illustrates something important: RMS and the GNU project have always had revolutionary goals. They created the GPLv2 (I don't know what v1 was like) and it resonated with a lot of people that had all kinds of different goals. The goals have always been different but people haven't had to think about this until now that GPLv3 is trying to more completely express the GNU project's crusade.
It is very likely that the GPLv3 will fail to resonate with a lot of the GPLv2's supporters. It's interesting that Linus, for example, talks about RedHat and trying to create a secure system through signed packages and modules. It does look like the GPLv3 will forbid this type of system. RMS has said that he doesn't care about creating "the best" operating system or a "secure" operating system, just a free one. If RMS "takes all his toys and goes home" by forbidding the new versions of GNU tools to be placed under such a system he might inspire a massive fork of the entire body of GPLv2-licensed GNU tools. Many members of the FOSS community have seemingly already appropriated GNU code and licenses, originally written with Stallmanesque goals, to create the "best" or "most secure" operating system they can. Until this point they've been able to collaborate with the Stallmanites despite this. Maybe they'll have to consciously make their own crusade now, as parent says. That could either be a fun, rousing and productivity-sapping discussion, or just a bunch of people agreeing to put aside their differences and share under GPLv2 or some similar license.
I always thought that in order to "Run As" you needed the password of the user you were going to run as. Anyone on Windows right now that can test this? The beauty of sudo is that you can specify the additional permissions that each user can temporarily grant itself in the /etc/sudoers file, and then to get them they only have to authenticate as themselves. This means that you don't have to give out your root password, and that you can flexibly manage the permissions of each user if you choose to do so.
There have been plenty of buffer overrun vulnerabilities allowing potential arbitrary code execution on all major operating systems. There have been plenty of priviledge escalation vulnerabilities on all major operating systems. All you need to get from there to a real exploit is either (a) a vulnerable server listening on some port or (b) some user to click on the wrong link or open the wrong attachment.
90s Outlook had lots of problems. 90s IE had lots of problems. There's a big problem with user accounts on Windows and how difficult it is to run as non-admin. And Windows doesn't have effective tools like sudo to grant occasional privledges beyond the usual. These tools can be built onto Windows. Third-party developers can be pressured to release software that works with the security model. Exploits can be patched, and quality control can be improved. And there are a lot of people working for Microsoft on these very things.
Microsoft may never fully win the battle against hackers. But then again, I don't know if anyone ever can. Even OpenBSD has had security holes in its default install a few times, and it's fighting a much less malicious group of hackers than Windows is. I love using GNU/Linux; it's cool that Unix has had sudo since 1980 and a tradition of sane security practices. That doesn't mean we should get arrogant about security.
An ISP can try to give its customers a better experience, it can huff and puff and look tough. But blocking mailing lists won't stop actual spam. Spam is sent out by zombie machines. Random, short-lived little mail servers in random residential IP blocks.
E-mail lists work in a way that blogs and "yahoo groups" and stuff can't. Let's say I want to receive a newsletter that's sent whenever there's news. Once a week on average, sometimes more, sometimes less. I don't want to have to remember to check a web page all the time to see if there's news. I don't want to check it once weekly and find that they updated on an irregular day earlier in the week for a breaking announcement that I missed. I want that content to be pushed to me so I can read it if it's there as I take my afternoon tea, along with all the other news I read in that way.
You can go and reinvent the wheel, come up with another way to push content onto your users. If it gets popular enough it will be spammed. And yet there will still be a need to push content. Or maybe you could try something like RSS, if you wanted to install and set up a server that would be hit up every hour by whatever fraction of your users decided to even try "that newfangled RSS thing". Newsgroups are designed for just this purpose, but they of course have their own spam problems and many users don't know how to use them.
Or maybe AOL should just drop their arrogance, admit that spam is a difficult problem for which they have no better answer than anyone else, and start behaving with a level of responsibility corresponding to the effect they have on the Internet community.
Perhaps among developers at Google (along with many other places) CNN Money would be a pretty backwater news site compared to Slashdot. This might be even more true in a communist country. Though I suspect that not much of either site makes it through the firewall.
Or maybe I'm just projecting my own geekiness and apathy about the "financial news" onto technologists worldwide.
There are a number of reasons that might be the case, such as the way bootscripts are done and what types of services are started. My desktop machine is an Athlon XP 2100+ with a gig of RAM running Gentoo and it boots to a command prompt significantly slower than my laptop, which is a P3 700, 192MB RAM, running FreeBSD.
Obviously the laptop has a much simpler hardware config, less services that it needs to run, and because I reboot it fairly often I actually bothered to clean out the rc files. In Gentoo at least I know that I want all those things started. With FC you might be probing parts of the hardware config that you have hard-configured into Gentoo, or starting sendmail, more hefty logging facilities, automounters or whatever. Actually, it wouldn't surprise me if FreeBSD's bootscripts are lighter-weight than Gentoo's in general.
I'm not discounting the booting speed advantage of Gentoo over, say, FC or Ubuntu. But take that Gentoo machine and make it run everything that FC runs on startup, and I bet a lot of the advantage goes away. Boot speed won't really tell you much about how the system will perform other tasks (as you can imagine, other than booting my laptop is much, much slower than my desktop).
Think about the amount of money that people make per hour at a tech company like Microsoft. The time they would spend deciding whether or not to make that sale would cost them more than $40-$100.
Look, I run plenty of software that's "version 0.3" and marked "EXPERIMENTAL, USE AT OWN RISK"; I run GNU/Linux and that goes with the territory (well at the moment I'm posting from FreeBSD and it goes a bit less with the territory there). But if you depend on some software for your career you might want something a bit more proven.