Actually in this case, I don't think ideology has anything to do it. Ideology might drive the license that you use, but once you select a license, it becomes a legal issue. Legal issues trump useability any day of the week.
The simple fact is, Linus has always allowed binary modules to be included in the GPL through some well defined interfaces and anyone who has contributed to his branch of the kernel has implicitly agreed to this arrangement. The kernel may *say* it's GPL2, but it's not and few judges would argue with that because binary modules have been an accepted part of the Linux kernel from day 1. This is further reenforced by the fact that there are "GLP_ONLY" definitions in the kernel which are only available to GPLed code and not binary modules. If the kernel were not meant to be GPL-only, these definitions would be redundant.
So basically, the Linux kernel is GPL2 plus exception. Personally, I wish this were clarified in the license once and for all because it brings up a lot of pointless legal debates about what can and can't be done with the kernel.
You're making a critical assumption that they let anyone post or edit. Just because Mediawiki allows anonymous users to edit sections does not mean that the QEDen website will. They could make the wiki read only for anyone who doesn't sign in. They may allow anyone to sign in, but cut them off if they start adding a lot of garbage instead of contributing things of value. If they wanted to allow anonymous contribution (in case there is a Ramanujan in the mix that is hesitant about logging in as you occassionaly find in Slashdot Anonymous Cowards or in case they want to have a place where young potential math specialists can have a place), they could section off a place for it, but separate it from the "legitimate discussions" so that anyone no interested in looking for hidden pearls doesn't have to deal with it.
In short, no-one needs to be annoyed if it's done right.
Clippy pops up and says: "You seem to be trying to access search.msn.com, but have mispelled it as google.com. Would you like to go to search.msn.com right away or visit one of the great set of beginner videos on MS' website that teach you about all the cool features of MSN? [Go to search.msn.com] [View video training] [Change Clippy Icon to XP Dog Icon] "
> Seeing the financial state that SCO is in, all of this legal action is simply > going to consume it's last resources.
How much is SCO really spending on the case?
It doesn't take a lot of effort to let IBM does all the work of trying to "prove their innocence" while SCO sits back and says "I'm not satisfied, show me more, it's obvious you're guilty of something but I won't tell you what it is because I'm too lazy to spend any resources to make my case."
It's one of the key reasons for the assumption of "innocense until proven guilty" principle in criminal law. If innocence were easily proved at no cost to privacy or personal freedom or reputation or budget, it would be possible to go on a legal fishing expedition without too many problems.
One of the cool things that results from this is that it'll be possible to embed Gtk+ applications into Qt and vise versa. That will eventually allow you to write a KPart (in KDE) or GPart (in GNOME) that can be embedded transparently in the other: http://www.scheinwelt.at/~norbertf/common_main_loo p/
> If they are only targetting PC makers that have agreed to only sell PCs with > their OS on them, then they have a legal, though morally questionable, right > to do this.
Do they? Suppose you have a site license for MS software? Why should you be double-taxed?
> "this works, but it is crap. We need to rewrite this."
As someone who's been through this situation, I can tell you that it rarely turns out as rosey as is first planned. My experience mirrors Netscape's.
When Netscape 4.x was opensourced, the developers said "this works, but it is crap. We need to rewrite this.", and they did. Four years later, they released a marginally good browser that was still behind IE and went from 95% of the market to 5%. If it wasn't for Firefox (which was an incremental change of the Mozilla code base), Netscape would be history in the Windows world. If Netscape took the incremental route of rewriting criticial portions in each release, it might have taken a bit longer, but they would have kept most of their market share.
> They declined any and all participation in creating ODF > and yet somehow they are involved in getting it ISO approved?
That isn't necessarily suspicous. What is suspicious is that they are going to try to fast-track a competing "standard" and refuse to implement ODF even as an export. This is quite clearly conflict of interest.
With a typical EULA license, if you reject the license, it should fall back on regular copyright law which doesn't include BSA clauses anti-fair use restrictions, but which includes a "no unauthorized copying provision".
With a CC license, if you reject the license, it should fall back on regular copyright law which gives you less rights (i.e. it includes a "no unauthorized copying provision").
> '...geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and you're not sitting there > cranking the thing while you're trying to type,' Gates said.'
*In best geezer voice* "Well back in my day we never had this fancy smancy WiFi and a hand crack or portable computers.We had Commodore PET/Vic20/C64 and these had far less power and screen resolution than these laptops and floppy drives that were slower than tape drives and we liked them real good."
Seriously, it's all a matter of perspective. These days we're all spoiled and as compiz, OS X, and friends become more entrenched, we'll be even more spoiled and be "unable to work on any desktop that doesn't have wobbly windows". I'm as guilty of that as anyone else.
But much of the world hasn't been spoiled yet and these "toys" are bleeding edge ways of getting things done.
I don't see a reason to feel conflicted, unless you believe that some people/companies/institutions are pure evil 100% of the time or pure good 100% of the time. The world is a bit more nuanced than that.
I'm sure if you looked at the lives of Stalin, Attilla the Hun, Saddam Hussein, and other despicable people you'd find that as bad as they were, they did *some* good. The opposite is true for Pope John Paul II, Ganhdi, and JFK.
My own philosophy is to praise people/companies/institutions when they're good (no matter how bad they are normally) and condemn people/companies/institutions when they're bad (no matter how good they are normally).
They've done a good job here and that's good enough for me.
I'll agree with you that a law is an observation, but only if you agree that laws can be wrong.
The laws of thermodynamics are observations that are held up by most current theory, but just like Newton's Law, we may one day discover situations where the laws of thermodynamics do not hold and we need to upgrade them.
> My largest complaint against GNOME right now is their philosophy that more features means less usability
Actually, that's a bit of a misconception. That was the attitude in GNOME 2.0 developers, but it has become a lot more nuanced as GNOME 2.4 and later evolved. The current attitude is that features are great, but it only makes sense to add them if you can find a good place to put them and only if you can come up with sensible defaults. It's possible to quickly slap together an interface that gives you all the fine grained X11 features or all the low level audo features of ALSA, but then that would be a nightmare to navigate and a nightmare to support. Despite KDE's cry of "give me all the features now", even they don't provide that level of power. Few people want it.
The key difference between KDE and GNOME on this front is that GNOME simply wants to take the time to do it right the first time using standard technology, while KDE would prefer to get the features now even if they have to make up their own technology and then evolve that to a right solution.
Both approaches are okay and your choice of GNOME or KDE says more about you than the desktop environment. Personally, I like GNOME's measured and polished approach. If I didn't have GNOME, I'd likely move to XFCE instead of KDE, since feels and works better for me. I'm guessing that many KDErs would likely move to Enlightenment instead of GNOME if KDE was unavailable for precisely the same reason.
> Race is an "unscientific construct", eh? How curious, then, that genetic tests can determine > with near-perfect reliability which of these imaginary
Okay. What race is Tiger Woods then? If Tiger Woods and his Swedish wife had children, what race would they be?
The thing about race is that it is an archetype. It exists in an idealised form like honesty and courage, but like most archetypes, it rarely exists in a pure form. When you say someone is honest, you don't mean that he/she never lies. You simply mean that there are few common situations where this person would lie. When you say someone is caucasian, you simply mean that this person has predominantly caucasian trades.
In many cases, it's possible to find people who fit more than one archetype. For example, stories are filled with "lovable rogues" or the "heroic thieves" or "cowards who end up saving the day".
Don't get hung up on abstract labels. It's a complex world out there. If you oversimply too much, all you end up with is spherical cows of uniform density.
It's my understanding that under the GPLv3, Dell wouldn't need to give you the keys.
However, they would need to give you the keygen program that would allow you to create your own keys. That allows you to gain the benefits of DRM (i.e. protect yourself) without the harm (i.e. be locked out of your own system by someone else).
As a side note, I see the key issue as basically equivalent to the library linkage limitation of the GPLv2
Under the GPLv2, I could take your app and create a long key (say 1MB) that was actually an encrypted proprietary library that contained it's encryption key as it's header. I would modify your GPLv2 app to be dependent on the long key so that it could not run unless it had this "encryption key" (which was really a library).
But how much of a special case is it? Our language has a word for the concept of "one more", and so we're capable of expressing the concept of counting in words, and thus arithmetic.
Apparently it's possible to teach 3rd and 4th grade students about binary arithmetic just by asking directed questions: http://www.garlikov.com/Soc_Meth.html The class already knew the concept of binary arithmetic, they just didn't know how to express it.
This tribe should already understand binary concepts (zero or many), at first glance, it should be possible to teach them binary arithmetic. The problem is, since there is no way to express that 11 and 111 are different, or how to convert one to the other (just "add one") and thus we can't teach them to count.
What I think Whorf was trying to say is that words are the way our minds can express and understand concepts. If we don't have a word, but we can express a concept in a language, then the language we use doesn't limit us. For example, we may not have a single word that can express the concept of "wet slushy snow with ice crystals", but since we have a string of words that can do it, we can still express our ideas. The problem comes when we have a concept that we can't put into words no matter how many words we string together. Because we don't have words for it, the concept cannot be related to other concepts or use as a basis for our thoughts. In mathematical terms, they are the "basis" in a vector space. The concepts we think about is limitted by the span of this vector space. Anything outside this vector space span are inaccessible to us, in much the same way that the third dimension is inaccessible to a flatlander. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland )
> Pointless bickering and scapegoating and power struggles... needless suffering and > death... and yes, I do believe that the vast majority of it could be solved if people > could set aside their emotions for a moment and work rationally towards a solution. >
Maybe that's the problem. Not all problems need a solution, but it doesn't matter to programmers and consultants since we're addicted to solving problems (even ones that we make up ourselves).
One thing I've discovered as I've aged is that most questions people ask are little more than rhetorical questions. They simply either want to know that you care or they want some confirmation that they are not totally out to lunch on an idea or they are just thinking out loud. They don't want you to solve their problems. I've also discovered that many of the "problems" in our lives are artificial. Most of the things we worry about just don't materialize and the ones that do, more likely than not, aren't worth the effort and stress we've put into worry about them.
IMO, it's a lot better to spend time figuring out if a problem is a problem before jumping in and trying to solve it. And if there really is a problem, it's often best to spend time figuring out if it's worth solving. One of the few things I remember from economics class was the concept of opportunity cost. It basically says that no matter what you do, you miss out on the benefits of doing the alternative. Essentially, everything you do has a tradeoff.
All this prescreening is a bit less fun that jumping in and solving problems, but it's amazingly liberating because it removes the need for a lot of the pointless bickering and scapegoating and power struggles. You have better things to do with your life.
But then I realized that it would be useless without a solution that integrated the various business silos with a results driven, customer directed, strategy that maximized ROI. Few businesses have the right paradigm or the Google Juice to effect such re-engineering.
It is my recommendation that Sun and Google set up a task force to appoint a counsil that would set up a committee to scan for low hanging fruit that can act as a change catalyst to empower businesses to achieve TQM.
> but what possible code could be "fallen through" into > that would set CPU execution *inside* the metafile
Actually, I think it was done for performance releases (remember, existed back in the Win 3.0 days).
Back in ye olden days, there was a common software practise called self modifying code. It was used in some implementations of FORTH, but it was far more popular on systems that had few registers like C64. It was generally used as a way to dramatically speed up code on those slow processors.
The source code it gives an example: "This module is chiefly concerned with the word processor editing functions.It contains many common subroutines, such as TOPCLR and PRMSG to clear the command line and print messages. It contains the initialization routines and takes care of memory moves (inserts and deletes). A second module, SPEED.2, is responsible for most input/output, including the printer routines. SPEED.1 is the largest file in the linked chain. UMOVE is a high-speed memory move routine. It gets its speed from self-modifying code (the $FFFFs at MOVLOOP are replaced by actual addresses when UMOVE is called). UMOVE is used to move an overlapping range of memory upward (toward location 0), so it is used to delete. Set FROML/FROMH to point to the source area of memory, DESTL/DESTH to point to the destination, and LLEN/HLEN to hold the length of the area being moved."
Even if they did detect the Sony rootkit, there's one key reason why Symantec shouldn't be chosen: It has zero experience with Unix security or Linux. Unix/Linux is fundamentally different than Windows in many ways. Picking Symantec to head Linux security is sort of like getting a chief mechanical engineer to be lead surgeon at a hospital. Sure there are a lot of mechanical aspects in the body and the engineer might see some places where things can be improved but the learning curve is huge. A much better choice would be Sun or IBM since both understand open source and both have solid Unix experience that spans decades.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually in this case, I don't think ideology has anything to do it. Ideology might drive the license that you use, but once you select a license, it becomes a legal issue. Legal issues trump useability any day of the week.
The simple fact is, Linus has always allowed binary modules to be included in the GPL through some well defined interfaces and anyone who has contributed to his branch of the kernel has implicitly agreed to this arrangement. The kernel may *say* it's GPL2, but it's not and few judges would argue with that because binary modules have been an accepted part of the Linux kernel from day 1. This is further reenforced by the fact that there are "GLP_ONLY" definitions in the kernel which are only available to GPLed code and not binary modules. If the kernel were not meant to be GPL-only, these definitions would be redundant.
So basically, the Linux kernel is GPL2 plus exception. Personally, I wish this were clarified in the license once and for all because it brings up a lot of pointless legal debates about what can and can't be done with the kernel.
You're making a critical assumption that they let anyone post or edit. Just because Mediawiki allows anonymous users to edit sections does not mean that the QEDen website will. They could make the wiki read only for anyone who doesn't sign in. They may allow anyone to sign in, but cut them off if they start adding a lot of garbage instead of contributing things of value. If they wanted to allow anonymous contribution (in case there is a Ramanujan in the mix that is hesitant about logging in as you occassionaly find in Slashdot Anonymous Cowards or in case they want to have a place where young potential math specialists can have a place), they could section off a place for it, but separate it from the "legitimate discussions" so that anyone no interested in looking for hidden pearls doesn't have to deal with it.
In short, no-one needs to be annoyed if it's done right.
Actually, it's more like:
Clippy pops up and says:
"You seem to be trying to access search.msn.com, but have mispelled it as google.com. Would you like to go to search.msn.com right away or visit one of the great set of beginner videos on MS' website that teach you about all the cool features of MSN?
[Go to search.msn.com] [View video training] [Change Clippy Icon to XP Dog Icon]
"
Personally, I think that the whole "Schodinger's Cat Paradox" is absurd.
If *you* are in the radio-active box instead of the cat, *you* know if you're dead or alive. It doesn't matter what anyone outside the box thinks.
Why should it be any different with the cat?
> Seeing the financial state that SCO is in, all of this legal action is simply
> going to consume it's last resources.
How much is SCO really spending on the case?
It doesn't take a lot of effort to let IBM does all the work of trying to "prove their innocence" while SCO sits back and says "I'm not satisfied, show me more, it's obvious you're guilty of something but I won't tell you what it is because I'm too lazy to spend any resources to make my case."
It's one of the key reasons for the assumption of "innocense until proven guilty" principle in criminal law. If innocence were easily proved at no cost to privacy or personal freedom or reputation or budget, it would be possible to go on a legal fishing expedition without too many problems.
It's actually a bit broader than that.
s /2005-December/000229.html
o p/
One thing that looks as if it will happen is that Gtk+, Qt, and any widget set wishing to be a part of the family will have a common event loop:
http://lists.osdl.org/pipermail/desktop_architect
One of the cool things that results from this is that it'll be possible to embed Gtk+ applications into Qt and vise versa. That will eventually allow you to write a KPart (in KDE) or GPart (in GNOME) that can be embedded transparently in the other:
http://www.scheinwelt.at/~norbertf/common_main_lo
There also appears to be some work in unifying the GNOMEVFS and KIOSLAVES:
http://www.scheinwelt.at/~norbertf/common-vfs/
> If they are only targetting PC makers that have agreed to only sell PCs with
> their OS on them, then they have a legal, though morally questionable, right
> to do this.
Do they? Suppose you have a site license for MS software?
Why should you be double-taxed?
> "this works, but it is crap. We need to rewrite this."
As someone who's been through this situation, I can tell you that it rarely turns out as rosey as is first planned. My experience mirrors Netscape's.
When Netscape 4.x was opensourced, the developers said "this works, but it is crap. We need to rewrite this.", and they did. Four years later, they released a marginally good browser that was still behind IE and went from 95% of the market to 5%. If it wasn't for Firefox (which was an incremental change of the Mozilla code base), Netscape would be history in the Windows world. If Netscape took the incremental route of rewriting criticial portions in each release, it might have taken a bit longer, but they would have kept most of their market share.
> They declined any and all participation in creating ODF
> and yet somehow they are involved in getting it ISO approved?
That isn't necessarily suspicous. What is suspicious is that they are going to try to fast-track a competing "standard" and refuse to implement ODF even as an export. This is quite clearly conflict of interest.
Does anyone know if there are any contrib builds for Solaris 8 as there are for Thunderbird and Firefox?
Alternately, does anyone know if there are any Java based alternatives to Lightning? The default CDE calendar that's installed at work is ancient.
Exactly.
With a typical EULA license, if you reject the license, it should fall back on regular copyright law which doesn't include BSA clauses anti-fair use restrictions, but which includes a "no unauthorized copying provision".
With a CC license, if you reject the license, it should fall back on regular copyright law which gives you less rights (i.e. it includes a "no unauthorized copying provision").
> '...geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and you're not sitting there
> cranking the thing while you're trying to type,' Gates said.'
*In best geezer voice*
"Well back in my day we never had this fancy smancy WiFi and a hand crack or portable computers.We had Commodore PET/Vic20/C64 and these had far less power and screen resolution than these laptops and floppy drives that were slower than tape drives and we liked them real good."
Seriously, it's all a matter of perspective. These days we're all spoiled and as compiz, OS X, and friends become more entrenched, we'll be even more spoiled and be "unable to work on any desktop that doesn't have wobbly windows". I'm as guilty of that as anyone else.
But much of the world hasn't been spoiled yet and these "toys" are bleeding edge ways of getting things done.
> I believe the Ubuntu equivalent to PLF is the Multiverse.
Actually, the Ubuntu equivalent to PLF is the PLF:-)
http://wiki.ubuntu-fr.org/doc/plf
I don't see a reason to feel conflicted, unless you believe that some people/companies/institutions are pure evil 100% of the time or pure good 100% of the time. The world is a bit more nuanced than that.
I'm sure if you looked at the lives of Stalin, Attilla the Hun, Saddam Hussein, and other despicable people you'd find that as bad as they were, they did *some* good. The opposite is true for Pope John Paul II, Ganhdi, and JFK.
My own philosophy is to praise people/companies/institutions when they're good (no matter how bad they are normally) and condemn people/companies/institutions when they're bad (no matter how good they are normally).
They've done a good job here and that's good enough for me.
I'll agree with you that a law is an observation, but only if you agree that laws can be wrong.
The laws of thermodynamics are observations that are held up by most current theory, but just like Newton's Law, we may one day discover situations where the laws of thermodynamics do not hold and we need to upgrade them.
> My largest complaint against GNOME right now is their philosophy that more features means less usability
Actually, that's a bit of a misconception. That was the attitude in GNOME 2.0 developers, but it has become a lot more nuanced as GNOME 2.4 and later evolved. The current attitude is that features are great, but it only makes sense to add them if you can find a good place to put them and only if you can come up with sensible defaults. It's possible to quickly slap together an interface that gives you all the fine grained X11 features or all the low level audo features of ALSA, but then that would be a nightmare to navigate and a nightmare to support. Despite KDE's cry of "give me all the features now", even they don't provide that level of power. Few people want it.
The key difference between KDE and GNOME on this front is that GNOME simply wants to take the time to do it right the first time using standard technology, while KDE would prefer to get the features now even if they have to make up their own technology and then evolve that to a right solution.
Both approaches are okay and your choice of GNOME or KDE says more about you than the desktop environment. Personally, I like GNOME's measured and polished approach. If I didn't have GNOME, I'd likely move to XFCE instead of KDE, since feels and works better for me. I'm guessing that many KDErs would likely move to Enlightenment instead of GNOME if KDE was unavailable for precisely the same reason.
> Race is an "unscientific construct", eh? How curious, then, that genetic tests can determine
> with near-perfect reliability which of these imaginary
Okay. What race is Tiger Woods then? If Tiger Woods and his Swedish wife had children, what race would they be?
The thing about race is that it is an archetype. It exists in an idealised form like honesty and courage, but like most archetypes, it rarely exists in a pure form. When you say someone is honest, you don't mean that he/she never lies. You simply mean that there are few common situations where this person would lie. When you say someone is caucasian, you simply mean that this person has predominantly caucasian trades.
In many cases, it's possible to find people who fit more than one archetype. For example, stories are filled with "lovable rogues" or the "heroic thieves" or "cowards who end up saving the day".
Don't get hung up on abstract labels. It's a complex world out there. If you oversimply too much, all you end up with is spherical cows of uniform density.
> Sources report Google is starting it's own religion that will effectively replace
> all of the other religions in the world. Thus saving the world.
Makes sense.
Since "Don't be evil" would be judged by the edicts of that religion. everything that Google would do would effectively be good.
It's my understanding that under the GPLv3, Dell wouldn't need to give you the keys.
However, they would need to give you the keygen program that would allow you to create your own keys. That allows you to gain the benefits of DRM (i.e. protect yourself) without the harm (i.e. be locked out of your own system by someone else).
As a side note, I see the key issue as basically equivalent to the library linkage limitation of the GPLv2
Under the GPLv2, I could take your app and create a long key (say 1MB) that was actually an encrypted proprietary library that contained it's encryption key as it's header. I would modify your GPLv2 app to be dependent on the long key so that it could not run unless it had this "encryption key" (which was really a library).
But how much of a special case is it? Our language has a word for the concept of "one more", and so we're capable of expressing the concept of counting in words, and thus arithmetic.
Apparently it's possible to teach 3rd and 4th grade students about binary arithmetic just by asking directed questions:
http://www.garlikov.com/Soc_Meth.html
The class already knew the concept of binary arithmetic, they just didn't know how to express it.
This tribe should already understand binary concepts (zero or many), at first glance, it should be possible to teach them binary arithmetic. The problem is, since there is no way to express that 11 and 111 are different, or how to convert one to the other (just "add one") and thus we can't teach them to count.
What I think Whorf was trying to say is that words are the way our minds can express and understand concepts. If we don't have a word, but we can express a concept in a language, then the language we use doesn't limit us. For example, we may not have a single word that can express the concept of "wet slushy snow with ice crystals", but since we have a string of words that can do it, we can still express our ideas. The problem comes when we have a concept that we can't put into words no matter how many words we string together. Because we don't have words for it, the concept cannot be related to other concepts or use as a basis for our thoughts. In mathematical terms, they are the "basis" in a vector space. The concepts we think about is limitted by the span of this vector space. Anything outside this vector space span are inaccessible to us, in much the same way that the third dimension is inaccessible to a flatlander. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland )
Have a look at this link:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3582794.stm
It's a concrete example how language limits what an Amazonian tribe can understand and how it limits what they are able to do.
> Pointless bickering and scapegoating and power struggles... needless suffering and
> death... and yes, I do believe that the vast majority of it could be solved if people
> could set aside their emotions for a moment and work rationally towards a solution.
>
Maybe that's the problem. Not all problems need a solution, but it doesn't matter to programmers and consultants since we're addicted to solving problems (even ones that we make up ourselves).
One thing I've discovered as I've aged is that most questions people ask are little more than rhetorical questions. They simply either want to know that you care or they want some confirmation that they are not totally out to lunch on an idea or they are just thinking out loud. They don't want you to solve their problems. I've also discovered that many of the "problems" in our lives are artificial. Most of the things we worry about just don't materialize and the ones that do, more likely than not, aren't worth the effort and stress we've put into worry about them.
IMO, it's a lot better to spend time figuring out if a problem is a problem before jumping in and trying to solve it. And if there really is a problem, it's often best to spend time figuring out if it's worth solving. One of the few things I remember from economics class was the concept of opportunity cost. It basically says that no matter what you do, you miss out on the benefits of doing the alternative. Essentially, everything you do has a tradeoff.
All this prescreening is a bit less fun that jumping in and solving problems, but it's amazingly liberating because it removes the need for a lot of the pointless bickering and scapegoating and power struggles. You have better things to do with your life.
I thought so too!
But then I realized that it would be useless without a solution that integrated the various business silos with a results driven, customer directed, strategy that maximized ROI. Few businesses have the right paradigm or the Google Juice to effect such re-engineering.
It is my recommendation that Sun and Google set up a task force to appoint a counsil that would set up a committee to scan for low hanging fruit that can act as a change catalyst to empower businesses to achieve TQM.
Oh yeah, BINGO!
> but what possible code could be "fallen through" into
7 05-speedscript.html or http://www.atariarchives.org/speedscript/ch3.php ).
> that would set CPU execution *inside* the metafile
Actually, I think it was done for performance releases (remember, existed back in the Win 3.0 days).
Back in ye olden days, there was a common software practise called self modifying code. It was used in some implementations of FORTH, but it was far more popular on systems that had few registers like C64. It was generally used as a way to dramatically speed up code on those slow processors.
Have a look at the popular C64/Atari program SpeedScript (see http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/gazette/198
The source code it gives an example:
"This module is chiefly concerned with the word processor editing functions.It contains many common subroutines, such as TOPCLR and PRMSG to clear the command line and print messages. It contains the initialization routines and takes care of memory moves (inserts and deletes). A second module, SPEED.2, is responsible for most input/output, including the printer routines. SPEED.1 is the largest file in the linked chain. UMOVE is a high-speed memory move routine. It gets its speed from self-modifying code (the $FFFFs at MOVLOOP are replaced by actual addresses when UMOVE is called). UMOVE is used to move an overlapping range of memory upward (toward location 0), so it is used to delete. Set FROML/FROMH to point to the source area of memory, DESTL/DESTH to point to the destination, and LLEN/HLEN to hold the length of the area being moved."
Even if they did detect the Sony rootkit, there's one key reason why Symantec shouldn't be chosen: It has zero experience with Unix security or Linux. Unix/Linux is fundamentally different than Windows in many ways. Picking Symantec to head Linux security is sort of like getting a chief mechanical engineer to be lead surgeon at a hospital. Sure there are a lot of mechanical aspects in the body and the engineer might see some places where things can be improved but the learning curve is huge. A much better choice would be Sun or IBM since both understand open source and both have solid Unix experience that spans decades.