That's an interesting thought, but I can imagine the sort of disasters that could occur if a router broke down or a fiber line was cut. Although it may not always be the most efficient use, there is something to be gained by not putting all your eggs in one basket. I'd rather e.g. police and ambulance radios used simpler, more reliable technologies.
That being said, a lot of what's currently there could indeed be replaced easily by IP services. When the bandwidth is there and it's profitable enough, they will eventually start creeping into the marketplace. Commercial IP telephone service for instance is already here. Internet "radio stations" have been around for a while, and as streaming technology improves it may end up overtaking FM.
FWIW, SOR is a console game, not an arcade game. Still, it was a great game for its time. Streets of Rage II is IMHO at least as good as the first, though I'd avoid the third. They didn't get Yuzo Koshiro to do the music on that version, and it shows. The rest of the game didn't feel quite the same either. Even in my day, it was just a rental.
Try adding an NVidia card with their HW-accelerated drivers. Although having a multitasking OS is going to give you some overhead, better driver support may give you better performance in some of the higher resolution games. I'm quite happy with the performance of xmame on my system.
It's worth mentioning that the HotRod SE comes with a set of Capcom ROMs intended to be used with MAME. The disc I received had 14 games, including Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting, Strider, Ghouls'N Ghosts, Magic Sword and 1941. It's supposedly "Series 1", I'm not sure if they've issued any further discs. The controller is quite durable as well, I've had it for 4 years and it's still working perfectly.
It's interesting that the statistics he quotes were from 1998. That's 6 years ago. I wonder how much different they might be if taken more recently, especially considering the fallout of the dot-coms and any perceived value that was placed in those companies. Statistics can say a lot of things, depending on how you put them together.
In any case, even if his statistics were on-target he's not just talking about software. Rather, he's talking about the abolition of all IP as we know it, which is a different argument than open source vs. proprietary, closed-source software. Not all of those intangible assets are software, and not all of the software in the industry has (or will have) an open source competitor.
Sure, people have a 401(k). Until they're outsourced, and forced to eat into that 401(k) to survive. Seriously, outsourcing wouldn't be a problem if they weren't removing the jobs from the US. If these companies were merely adding employees in other countries such that they could more successfully compete in those markets, which Mr. Barrett seems to be arguing, I'd buy that. If they were adding employees in these countries to access technology that we simply don't have, I'd buy that as well.
What I don't buy is companies moving jobs into other countries simply because they can pay the workers less money. That money, coming from our pockets as consumers, leaves the country and never comes back. Sure, it benefits the places where the jobs are outsourced, but what happens when there aren't enough jobs here to keep a reasonable demand for their product?
If these CEOs don't want to be labeled "Benedict Arnold", perhaps "Turncoat" or "Traitor" would be better. There's nothing noble about shipping jobs off to other countries to increase their stock's value.
The question isn't whether the artist was negligent about posting a license. He assumed that his intent was clear, obviously not everyone gets it. He's learned this lesson the hard way, and has put a license on his site now.
The question is, why did Lindows/Linspire/... choose to use these images without even contacting the artist? The least they could have done is drop a note before using it in a commercial product. They do intend to make a profit using the artist's efforts. If a company uses a major label's song or logo in their product without asking, they'll surely be hearing from the RIAA's thugs. If it has to be this way, then there should be no double standards. Companies should also pay for content created by people.
Sure, kdevelop is part and parcel of KDE. The interface should be pretty familiar to anyone who's tooled around in certain other proprietary IDEs. Python's also rather popular these days, here's an article on the PyQT bindings:
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/libr ar y/l-qt/
Whether or not this is exactly what you're looking for, it's enough to get the job done. If python doesn't tickle your fancy, there are Qt bindings to several other scripting languages. Kdevelop supports a number of them, though Python might be the most legible of the set.
I do believe you've got it. One thing I would add is that the development model and licensing of Linux ensures that ideas are shared between vendors, avoiding the necessity for multiple implementations that plagued UNIX vendors in the past. That's what I think will slingshot Linux into the "as good as or better" quality range more quickly than any other model has been able to in the past. Whatever one might think of the GPL, the guarantees it makes are powerful. The GPL is ideal for a commodity system, and the US economy at least loves commodities.
I actually think that Sun hardware for Linux is a great idea. As long as they ensure that their hardware works flawlessly with Linux, have reasonably competitive prices, and don't play the firmware/chipset version game that Dell does on systems of the same model, they might be able to yank the Linux server market out from under Dell. That assumes a good deal of commitment on Sun's part, which I'll believe when I see. Nevertheless, the possibilities are intriguing.
It certainly doesn't, and app developers have the option to use the raw device if they're really that worried about it. Oracle e.g. can do this. Still, the IO subsystem has improved significantly in the 2.6 kernels. Worst case blocking from large chunks of IO have been reduced. Instrumentation on system IO is also improved, you can finally tell that a Linux system is IO bound and not just at a load average of 1.2 for no reason. (About time.)
FWIW, SCSI drives and controllers have implemented command queuing and reordering for ages. SATA will also implement it, though not quite to the degree that SCSI does. If your transactional systems run faster with SCSI drives than they do with similar parallel IDE drives, there's a good chance that command queuing and reordering has something to do with the improved performance. An OS' kernel implementation can add some extra optimizations that the device might not see, since it has a bigger picture of what's going to the disk.
You might even want to give the 2.6 kernel a look if you're doing large transactional operations. Despite your assertion that Linux is somehow dead, development is moving along quite happily.;-)
I have an old Mac laptop, a PB1400, having used Macs since the venerable Mac Plus. I eventually moved to the PC platform due to frustraction with Apple's lack of direction. (This was pre-Jobs' return, back when Apple really was dying.) I haven't even considered buying another one, despite Apple finally bringing their OS into the realm of modern software technology.
The irony is that there's just one major issue that prevents me from getting another Mac laptop, and that's the lack of multiple buttons on the pointing device. Having used 3 button/wheel mice for so long, one button pointers just feel like a toy. Adding an external rodent isn't the answer, it's a laptop and should be portable. If Apple could see their way to fixing this issue, I'd probably buy a new Powerbook. I doubt that'll happen within my lifetime though.
That being said, I don't think I'd ever buy another Mac desktop/tower. The Powerbooks are fine for the limited number of things I'd rather do on a laptop, but the desktops limit choice and expandability entirely too much for my taste. Even given competitive prices, the "CPU upgrade == new computer" paradigm is simply no longer attractive to me. Never mind that paying an extra $30 for year-old games gets old after a while.
I believe what IBM holds, just as Microsoft does, is adequately covered by the golden rule. "He who has the gold, makes the rules." Read into that what you will.:-)
Most likely they're just doing in-between frames, basically making sure that the animation flows consistently between what the original artists actually drew. It doesn't leave much work for creativity, they just need to ensure that things look good. If you liked the Simpsons in the past then you don't have much to worry about, as they've been doing this for years.
No to my knowledge, Lite-on is primarily based in Taiwan. Samsung's a Korean company, so odds are they're totally unrelated. Stranger things have happened though.
Interesting. I've had great luck with MDK and don't see it as being that difficult, nor has it been unstable for that matter. I'm not a newbie to be sure, I've installed and used various distros of Linux for 9 years. I work with Linux for a living now, and have tried just about every Linux distro under the sun. MDK simply gives me an installation that I can use immediately without the usual tweaking runaround that Linux distros tend to require. Here's my.02, perhaps it might be of some use.
1) Uncontrollable? If you mean it jumps around in odd directions, perhaps the mouse driver was detected incorrectly. If you have a USB or PS/2 mouse with a wheel between the two buttons, X should use a driver known as IMPS2. Otherwise it should use the PS/2 driver in most cases. With serial mice all bets are off. Could be MouseSystems, could be something else. Regardless, the installer should choose which driver to use based on your selection during the install.
If you mean it's simply too fast or too slow of course, which seems to be the case but I'm making no assumptions, all of this was irrelevant. You apparently didn't get the desired result from the standard adjustments, so I won't go into that.
2) I saw two messages in the link you posted, but there didn't seem to be that much in them. It looks like you were trying to install an RPM from another source rather than a Mandrake-built version, which might well be where your issues are coming from. I recommend adding the PLF and Contribs sources to your urpmi configuration if you are trying to install a package, and then either typing "urpmi (packagename)" in a shell or installing it through rpmdrake. The PLF packages depend on Contribs being in your urpmi sources for some of their dependencies, so if you're trying to install from PLF be sure that Contribs have been added and are working.
3) I don't know what the problem could have been, it seems you've had terrible luck with this and I sympathize. I used MDK 9.2 in the past and am now using 10, and have not seen such issues with Konqueror or the rest of the system for that matter. The one issue I did have (on my Athlon system) was due to NVidia's closed source driver, and going through their forums solved the issue.
4) That's odd, GUI applications added via urpmi/rpmdrake add entries to the menu on my systems. As the person in the forum told you, if the menus are out of sync you can run the update-menus script. Within KDE you can hit alt-f2 and type update-menus in the resulting dialog box (which is much like the "Run" dialog in Windows.) That might help, and of course keeping the system up to date with bugfixes and security updates using MandrakeUpdate helps also. Every OS should be patched, even UNIX and similar systems like Linux.
BTW, if you want to know where a package puts files, you can always type "rpm -ql (packagename)" in a shell to get a listing of every file it installs.
5) Some hardware is supported better than others, them's the breaks. Sometimes, when a hardware vendor doesn't cooperate then the Linux driver developer doesn't have much to go on when writing the driver. Installing appropriate drivers is typically easy under Mandrake, but in any OS (even XP) there's hardware that for whatever reason is a pain to install. It looks like your sound card got the short end of the stick under Linux on your system, at least under this release of Mandrake.
As others have said, perhaps MDK 10 might help. The 2.6 kernel is where most efforts to support new hardware under Linux have been going recently, so there's a method to the madness in this case.
6) My home desktop's monitor, a ViewSonic A75f, has similar specs to yours. I didn't have any problems with it being detected incorrectly, it came up properly after the install. Did you choose the 3.3 release of XFree86 or 4.x? 4.x releases can get the DDC information from your monitor, so you can typically set it to "plug and play monitor" and it will just work automatically. That assumes that
True, there's a finite supply of real estate. There is however a relatively large number of people who have refinanced their homes from the safety of a fixed rate mortgage to a less expensive but variable mortgage. That's fine now while interest rates are low. When interest rates start to rise again, you're going to find a lot of people who, when the rates double, triple or even quadruple (remember, interest rates are extremely low now) will be caught off guard with these higher payments. Many will not be able to pay, and will be forced to sell.
Of course, the housing prices will have to go down to accomodate the higher costs of interest. Thus, these homeowners won't be able to pay off their entire mortgage simply by selling. That leaves a lot of people in an interesting financial situation, and it's not hard to imagine a crash under these circumstances. This could happen as early as next year, given the way the economy has been headed.
He does have a point which shouldn't be dismissed without some thought. Do you remember when the primary version of Java under Linux was from Blackdown? There was quite a bit of friction when Sun released a Linux version of Java without any credit toward the Blackdown team. I doubt that Microsoft would be terribly worried about pulling the same stunt themselves.
Sure, and the Mandrake 10.0 beta 1 was out January 22nd with a 2.6.1 kernel. The 10.0 RC1 was further available on Feb. 17th with a 2.6.2rc3 kernel. Bit of a silly argument though.
This doesn't seem to be the case. It's the same vulnerability announced a few weeks ago, for which a fix has been available for some time. He updated it with exploit code on Monday, but this is after the fact. I woke up this morning, looked over and tried the exploit code, which failed. I then realized that it's testing for the same vulnerability that I've already patched. I suppose that it took so long to realize this proves that I'm not a morning person.
In short, he doesn't need to release a patch. Properly administered systems aren't even vulnerable anymore.
The executable bit may not have been intended as a security feature, but sometimes things get used in ways that they weren't intended. The current set of email clients under *nix, even those that attempt to emulate the Outlook interface for whatever reason, do not play cowboy and automatically execute attached applications when you click on them. They don't set the executable bit on every file that you download either. The average email client author knows that this isn't safe behavior. It should be the user in the end that determines which files are executable, not the email client.
As a recent example, someone at work accidentally clicked an attachment containing a new virus that his AV software didn't detect, despite his initial impression that the email wasn't from the sender. You might say that he shouldn't have clicked on it to begin with, and I'd agree. If the system had not executed the attachment automatically though, he wouldn't have been infected. I think the best analogy is seatbelts and airbags. You never set out to get in an accident, but it's certainly nice to have that extra layer of protection if it happens.
FWIW, I think that MS is doing a great thing here. I'm no fan of their software, especially that damned corruptible, binary, single-point-of-failure registry. It does appear that they have actually pulled their head out of the sand and started securing their code though. It isn't going to be enough to make me want use their products on my system, as there are other reasons I prefer Linux that are incompabible with MS' business model. It may however make my life easier at work where it is used on some systems, and give me fewer reasons to curse their name in general.
SCO seems to interpret the entire set of files as Linux, not just the kernel. They stated "Linux operating system", not "Linux kernel". Even so, their press statements aren't exactly white towers of accuracy.
Odds are they will claim in court that the application may be running under iBCS2 or something similar. That even involves a kernel module under Linux, which ends up pointing to shared libraries on the system. Given that this isn't the case, it should be easy enough to prove that SCO's claims are false.
Also, I hate to pick but... Minna kirai? Why don't you tell us how you really feel?;-)
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That's an interesting thought, but I can imagine the sort of disasters that could occur if a router broke down or a fiber line was cut. Although it may not always be the most efficient use, there is something to be gained by not putting all your eggs in one basket. I'd rather e.g. police and ambulance radios used simpler, more reliable technologies.
That being said, a lot of what's currently there could indeed be replaced easily by IP services. When the bandwidth is there and it's profitable enough, they will eventually start creeping into the marketplace. Commercial IP telephone service for instance is already here. Internet "radio stations" have been around for a while, and as streaming technology improves it may end up overtaking FM.
FWIW, SOR is a console game, not an arcade game. Still, it was a great game for its time. Streets of Rage II is IMHO at least as good as the first, though I'd avoid the third. They didn't get Yuzo Koshiro to do the music on that version, and it shows. The rest of the game didn't feel quite the same either. Even in my day, it was just a rental.
Try adding an NVidia card with their HW-accelerated drivers. Although having a multitasking OS is going to give you some overhead, better driver support may give you better performance in some of the higher resolution games. I'm quite happy with the performance of xmame on my system.
It's worth mentioning that the HotRod SE comes with a set of Capcom ROMs intended to be used with MAME. The disc I received had 14 games, including Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting, Strider, Ghouls'N Ghosts, Magic Sword and 1941. It's supposedly "Series 1", I'm not sure if they've issued any further discs. The controller is quite durable as well, I've had it for 4 years and it's still working perfectly.
It's interesting that the statistics he quotes were from 1998. That's 6 years ago. I wonder how much different they might be if taken more recently, especially considering the fallout of the dot-coms and any perceived value that was placed in those companies. Statistics can say a lot of things, depending on how you put them together.
In any case, even if his statistics were on-target he's not just talking about software. Rather, he's talking about the abolition of all IP as we know it, which is a different argument than open source vs. proprietary, closed-source software. Not all of those intangible assets are software, and not all of the software in the industry has (or will have) an open source competitor.
Sure, people have a 401(k). Until they're outsourced, and forced to eat into that 401(k) to survive. Seriously, outsourcing wouldn't be a problem if they weren't removing the jobs from the US. If these companies were merely adding employees in other countries such that they could more successfully compete in those markets, which Mr. Barrett seems to be arguing, I'd buy that. If they were adding employees in these countries to access technology that we simply don't have, I'd buy that as well.
What I don't buy is companies moving jobs into other countries simply because they can pay the workers less money. That money, coming from our pockets as consumers, leaves the country and never comes back. Sure, it benefits the places where the jobs are outsourced, but what happens when there aren't enough jobs here to keep a reasonable demand for their product?
If these CEOs don't want to be labeled "Benedict Arnold", perhaps "Turncoat" or "Traitor" would be better. There's nothing noble about shipping jobs off to other countries to increase their stock's value.
The question isn't whether the artist was negligent about posting a license. He assumed that his intent was clear, obviously not everyone gets it. He's learned this lesson the hard way, and has put a license on his site now.
The question is, why did Lindows/Linspire/... choose to use these images without even contacting the artist? The least they could have done is drop a note before using it in a commercial product. They do intend to make a profit using the artist's efforts. If a company uses a major label's song or logo in their product without asking, they'll surely be hearing from the RIAA's thugs. If it has to be this way, then there should be no double standards. Companies should also pay for content created by people.
Sure, kdevelop is part and parcel of KDE. The interface should be pretty familiar to anyone who's tooled around in certain other proprietary IDEs. Python's also rather popular these days, here's an article on the PyQT bindings:
r ar y/l-qt/
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/lib
Whether or not this is exactly what you're looking for, it's enough to get the job done. If python doesn't tickle your fancy, there are Qt bindings to several other scripting languages. Kdevelop supports a number of them, though Python might be the most legible of the set.
I do believe you've got it. One thing I would add is that the development model and licensing of Linux ensures that ideas are shared between vendors, avoiding the necessity for multiple implementations that plagued UNIX vendors in the past. That's what I think will slingshot Linux into the "as good as or better" quality range more quickly than any other model has been able to in the past. Whatever one might think of the GPL, the guarantees it makes are powerful. The GPL is ideal for a commodity system, and the US economy at least loves commodities.
I actually think that Sun hardware for Linux is a great idea. As long as they ensure that their hardware works flawlessly with Linux, have reasonably competitive prices, and don't play the firmware/chipset version game that Dell does on systems of the same model, they might be able to yank the Linux server market out from under Dell. That assumes a good deal of commitment on Sun's part, which I'll believe when I see. Nevertheless, the possibilities are intriguing.
It certainly doesn't, and app developers have the option to use the raw device if they're really that worried about it. Oracle e.g. can do this. Still, the IO subsystem has improved significantly in the 2.6 kernels. Worst case blocking from large chunks of IO have been reduced. Instrumentation on system IO is also improved, you can finally tell that a Linux system is IO bound and not just at a load average of 1.2 for no reason. (About time.)
;-)
FWIW, SCSI drives and controllers have implemented command queuing and reordering for ages. SATA will also implement it, though not quite to the degree that SCSI does. If your transactional systems run faster with SCSI drives than they do with similar parallel IDE drives, there's a good chance that command queuing and reordering has something to do with the improved performance. An OS' kernel implementation can add some extra optimizations that the device might not see, since it has a bigger picture of what's going to the disk.
You might even want to give the 2.6 kernel a look if you're doing large transactional operations. Despite your assertion that Linux is somehow dead, development is moving along quite happily.
I have an old Mac laptop, a PB1400, having used Macs since the venerable Mac Plus. I eventually moved to the PC platform due to frustraction with Apple's lack of direction. (This was pre-Jobs' return, back when Apple really was dying.) I haven't even considered buying another one, despite Apple finally bringing their OS into the realm of modern software technology.
The irony is that there's just one major issue that prevents me from getting another Mac laptop, and that's the lack of multiple buttons on the pointing device. Having used 3 button/wheel mice for so long, one button pointers just feel like a toy. Adding an external rodent isn't the answer, it's a laptop and should be portable. If Apple could see their way to fixing this issue, I'd probably buy a new Powerbook. I doubt that'll happen within my lifetime though.
That being said, I don't think I'd ever buy another Mac desktop/tower. The Powerbooks are fine for the limited number of things I'd rather do on a laptop, but the desktops limit choice and expandability entirely too much for my taste. Even given competitive prices, the "CPU upgrade == new computer" paradigm is simply no longer attractive to me. Never mind that paying an extra $30 for year-old games gets old after a while.
It has excellent bump mapping, but you need a braille tty device to take advantage of it.
I believe what IBM holds, just as Microsoft does, is adequately covered by the golden rule. "He who has the gold, makes the rules." Read into that what you will. :-)
Most likely they're just doing in-between frames, basically making sure that the animation flows consistently between what the original artists actually drew. It doesn't leave much work for creativity, they just need to ensure that things look good. If you liked the Simpsons in the past then you don't have much to worry about, as they've been doing this for years.
No to my knowledge, Lite-on is primarily based in Taiwan. Samsung's a Korean company, so odds are they're totally unrelated. Stranger things have happened though.
Dear anonymous bystander,
Thank you for this somewhat creative, albeit strained, display of sarcasm. I'll treasure it for the next moment or so to come.
Interesting. I've had great luck with MDK and don't see it as being that difficult, nor has it been unstable for that matter. I'm not a newbie to be sure, I've installed and used various distros of Linux for 9 years. I work with Linux for a living now, and have tried just about every Linux distro under the sun. MDK simply gives me an installation that I can use immediately without the usual tweaking runaround that Linux distros tend to require. Here's my .02, perhaps it might be of some use.
1) Uncontrollable? If you mean it jumps around in odd directions, perhaps the mouse driver was detected incorrectly. If you have a USB or PS/2 mouse with a wheel between the two buttons, X should use a driver known as IMPS2. Otherwise it should use the PS/2 driver in most cases. With serial mice all bets are off. Could be MouseSystems, could be something else. Regardless, the installer should choose which driver to use based on your selection during the install.
If you mean it's simply too fast or too slow of course, which seems to be the case but I'm making no assumptions, all of this was irrelevant. You apparently didn't get the desired result from the standard adjustments, so I won't go into that.
2) I saw two messages in the link you posted, but there didn't seem to be that much in them. It looks like you were trying to install an RPM from another source rather than a Mandrake-built version, which might well be where your issues are coming from. I recommend adding the PLF and Contribs sources to your urpmi configuration if you are trying to install a package, and then either typing "urpmi (packagename)" in a shell or installing it through rpmdrake. The PLF packages depend on Contribs being in your urpmi sources for some of their dependencies, so if you're trying to install from PLF be sure that Contribs have been added and are working.
3) I don't know what the problem could have been, it seems you've had terrible luck with this and I sympathize. I used MDK 9.2 in the past and am now using 10, and have not seen such issues with Konqueror or the rest of the system for that matter. The one issue I did have (on my Athlon system) was due to NVidia's closed source driver, and going through their forums solved the issue.
4) That's odd, GUI applications added via urpmi/rpmdrake add entries to the menu on my systems. As the person in the forum told you, if the menus are out of sync you can run the update-menus script. Within KDE you can hit alt-f2 and type update-menus in the resulting dialog box (which is much like the "Run" dialog in Windows.) That might help, and of course keeping the system up to date with bugfixes and security updates using MandrakeUpdate helps also. Every OS should be patched, even UNIX and similar systems like Linux.
BTW, if you want to know where a package puts files, you can always type "rpm -ql (packagename)" in a shell to get a listing of every file it installs.
5) Some hardware is supported better than others, them's the breaks. Sometimes, when a hardware vendor doesn't cooperate then the Linux driver developer doesn't have much to go on when writing the driver. Installing appropriate drivers is typically easy under Mandrake, but in any OS (even XP) there's hardware that for whatever reason is a pain to install. It looks like your sound card got the short end of the stick under Linux on your system, at least under this release of Mandrake.
As others have said, perhaps MDK 10 might help. The 2.6 kernel is where most efforts to support new hardware under Linux have been going recently, so there's a method to the madness in this case.
6) My home desktop's monitor, a ViewSonic A75f, has similar specs to yours. I didn't have any problems with it being detected incorrectly, it came up properly after the install. Did you choose the 3.3 release of XFree86 or 4.x? 4.x releases can get the DDC information from your monitor, so you can typically set it to "plug and play monitor" and it will just work automatically. That assumes that
True, there's a finite supply of real estate. There is however a relatively large number of people who have refinanced their homes from the safety of a fixed rate mortgage to a less expensive but variable mortgage. That's fine now while interest rates are low. When interest rates start to rise again, you're going to find a lot of people who, when the rates double, triple or even quadruple (remember, interest rates are extremely low now) will be caught off guard with these higher payments. Many will not be able to pay, and will be forced to sell.
Of course, the housing prices will have to go down to accomodate the higher costs of interest. Thus, these homeowners won't be able to pay off their entire mortgage simply by selling. That leaves a lot of people in an interesting financial situation, and it's not hard to imagine a crash under these circumstances. This could happen as early as next year, given the way the economy has been headed.
Experts eh? I know a Linux desktop when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now...
He does have a point which shouldn't be dismissed without some thought. Do you remember when the primary version of Java under Linux was from Blackdown? There was quite a bit of friction when Sun released a Linux version of Java without any credit toward the Blackdown team. I doubt that Microsoft would be terribly worried about pulling the same stunt themselves.
Sure, and the Mandrake 10.0 beta 1 was out January 22nd with a 2.6.1 kernel. The 10.0 RC1 was further available on Feb. 17th with a 2.6.2rc3 kernel. Bit of a silly argument though.
This doesn't seem to be the case. It's the same vulnerability announced a few weeks ago, for which a fix has been available for some time. He updated it with exploit code on Monday, but this is after the fact. I woke up this morning, looked over and tried the exploit code, which failed. I then realized that it's testing for the same vulnerability that I've already patched. I suppose that it took so long to realize this proves that I'm not a morning person.
In short, he doesn't need to release a patch. Properly administered systems aren't even vulnerable anymore.
The executable bit may not have been intended as a security feature, but sometimes things get used in ways that they weren't intended. The current set of email clients under *nix, even those that attempt to emulate the Outlook interface for whatever reason, do not play cowboy and automatically execute attached applications when you click on them. They don't set the executable bit on every file that you download either. The average email client author knows that this isn't safe behavior. It should be the user in the end that determines which files are executable, not the email client.
As a recent example, someone at work accidentally clicked an attachment containing a new virus that his AV software didn't detect, despite his initial impression that the email wasn't from the sender. You might say that he shouldn't have clicked on it to begin with, and I'd agree. If the system had not executed the attachment automatically though, he wouldn't have been infected. I think the best analogy is seatbelts and airbags. You never set out to get in an accident, but it's certainly nice to have that extra layer of protection if it happens.
FWIW, I think that MS is doing a great thing here. I'm no fan of their software, especially that damned corruptible, binary, single-point-of-failure registry. It does appear that they have actually pulled their head out of the sand and started securing their code though. It isn't going to be enough to make me want use their products on my system, as there are other reasons I prefer Linux that are incompabible with MS' business model. It may however make my life easier at work where it is used on some systems, and give me fewer reasons to curse their name in general.
SCO seems to interpret the entire set of files as Linux, not just the kernel. They stated "Linux operating system", not "Linux kernel". Even so, their press statements aren't exactly white towers of accuracy.
;-)
Odds are they will claim in court that the application may be running under iBCS2 or something similar. That even involves a kernel module under Linux, which ends up pointing to shared libraries on the system. Given that this isn't the case, it should be easy enough to prove that SCO's claims are false.
Also, I hate to pick but... Minna kirai? Why don't you tell us how you really feel?
Ford, what about my home? :-)