Register says DFS is wrong... 686

Oh, you're talking about *trojan horses*. That's entirely different from an accidental security flaw. (Nice way to change the subject when you're losing...)

There have been a handful of Linux trojans, none of which have spread far. Many of them pose as tools to crack other systems, e.g. Zab and Maxload. On Windows, thousands, not even counting adware and spyware. Cute. Of course, the alert you link to explicitly states:

"If fliccd does not run as daemon remote exploitation of this vulnerability is not possible. KDE as shipped by Gentoo does not start the daemon in the default installation."

Oh, and how was this discovered?

"Erik Sjolund discovered a buffer overflow in fliccd which is part of the INDI support in KStars."

Sounds like things are working as they should.

Why should we? *You* can't seem to stick to a 'single storyline'. See above, where you switch from talking about security flaws to talking about trojans. Or when you talked about open source developers stealing 'closed source programs', then totally ignored all requests to provide any kind of example - you just dropped the subject and moved on to other lies^H^H^H^Htopics.

Try getting some of them to even *start*, much less run... much easier with Linux, since usually you have the source code. And yet it works. I don't know how many users of Ostiary there are; I wouldn't be shocked if there were only a couple dozen. But I've gotten bug reports and contributions like init scripts and such.

Hardly original with either of us. Oh, and as to the actual substance of my claim:

"after viewing the source, there is a permanent risk of legal challenge from Microsoft, alleging that any software they wrote after viewing the Microsoft source code breaks the terms of the NDA."

Quite the opposite. I much prefer using my 700MHz Linux box at work instead of my 2GHZ Windows box.

IE actually starts much slower... the problem is it's always 'already' running unless you patch the OS. Look up "win98 lite", it lets you stick the Win95 explorer shell on top of Win98. Works fine, and when you start up IE, you get a spash screen and all. Takes forever.

That's rather harder to do on WinXP, so the test you've proposed isn't at all fair. Again, lets see some timing of the same apps on the same hardware.

I asked you about hardware on this one, and you never responded. I'm used to it, but just figured I'd point it out.

Aw, cute, you found a kernel oops with Google. Compare it to a blue screen on Windows, an error famous for its opacity. This Linux version even tells you exactly where the bug was, and what it consists of.

And this helps debug the problem how? How would anyone, even a developer, get any useful information out of it. (I can deduce that someone probably dereferenced a NULL pointer, but where?) Aw, poor baby. You don't *have* to look if it scares you. You can post a copy on a newsgroup or mailing list and others have a good chance of helping you, because they can actually get some information out of it.

How much does the VS IDE cost again? Linux gives you all this stuff by default, in a standard way.

No dice. System just went 'poof', not even a log entry. I'd come in the next morning and it would be rebooted, all the apps with their state gone. Didn't bother me too much, I don't use Windows for more than games, but my wife was a tad peeved. (*Almost* got her moved to Linux, once I can find a decent greeting card program. Gotta look into Wine soon, but with two small sons *and* a newborn...)

Eh. Short, twitch games are easily on a par. The larger, deeper games with elaborate levels and so forth take a lot of time and artistic effort to create, and that doesn't usually come free. I'm willing to believe that commercial games will be around for a long time.

There's no technical reason they can't run on Linux. Doom3 proves that. It's just a matter of market share and such. That'll change, in time.

For consumer-level needs, nope. For pro needs, it's a mixed bag; some things Windows does well, some things Linux does well (e.g. low-latency audio). The very best apps are available on Linux, too (e.g. Photoshop), though most consumers would be just as happy with the Gimp.

Y'know, mostly I concur. But it appears that actual humans disagree with us about 4 to 1. Running recent PC games takes a serious investment in money and time. Consoles are *much* cheaper (heck, the hardware is often subsidized) and the software is *always* compatible. Plus we're at the low end of the cycle - heck, the PS2 is almost exactly five years old. The next generation of consoles is coming up, and *they* will work with HDTVs. PCs will get past them, but it'll take a couple years.

-- Sincerely,

Ray Ingles (313) 227-2317

"Being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker any more than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer." - Eric Scott Raymond