Comment Re:Temporary measure (Score 2) 869
well, I switched from being a long time KDE user to GNOME because of 4.2. what a train wreck!
KDE 4.2 has not been released yet.
Comment Re:Mystery Pits (Score 1) 552
Under intense time pressure to work with previously theoretical isotopes that just might save tens of thousands of American lives?
At the cost of hundreds of thousands of civilian Japanese lives.
One thing I have thought about quite a few times: Why didn't the Americans just drop the atom bomb right *outside* a major city, thereby reducing the loss of lives to a minimum while still sending the same message of "give up, we can bomb you to back to dust"?
Qt Becomes LGPL 828
Aequo writes "Qt, the highly polished, well documented, modern GUI toolkit owned by Nokia, will be available under the LGPL starting with version 4.5! It was previously only mainly available under the GPL and a commercial license. Selling licenses was an important part of Qt under Trolltech as it was the company's main source of income, but Trolltech is a fruit-fly compared to Nokia, who want to encourage and stimulate the use of Qt Everywhere [PDF]. This is fantastic news for all commercial developers looking to create cross-platform applications without the need to buy a $4950 multi-platform license per developer."
Comment Re:Other concerns: OSS creep into commercial code (Score 2, Informative) 427
> Frankly, I understand the concern. If you are a development shop, then
> if OSS creeps into your product (due to a careless (and thoughtless)
> developer copy-pasting code, for instance) then the legal ramifications
> may be grave. Potentially, depending on the license, you are required to
> disclose the entire source of your product,
Bullshit.
If OSS "creeps into your product" by mistake, you won't ever have to
disclose the source code you have written. You just lose the right to
distribute the product with the stolen code.
Remove the stolen code and continue with your usual business.
"Poison pill", "viral GPL", etc. is FUD.
Microsoft Programming Contest Hacked and Defaced 151
davidmwilliams writes "Microsoft followed their major annual Tech-Ed event in Australia with a week-long programming contest called 'DevSta,' to find 'star developers.' While the quantity and quality of submissions suggest a poor turnout, it certainly caught the attention of at least two hackers who left their mark. Here is the low-down on the contest, what happened, by whom, and screen shots for posterity in case it's been fixed by the time you read this. And unless the volume of submissions increase dramatically within the next few hours, someone may be awarded an Xbox for doing nothing more than rewriting the Windows calculator as a .NET app."
Major Security Hole In Samsung Linux Drivers 295
GerbilSoft writes with news of a major security hole in Samsung's proprietary Linux printer drivers. From the Ubuntu Forums: "Just to inform you about a recent post on the French Ubuntu forum about Samsung drivers (sorry, in French). [Google translation here.] It appears that Samsung unified drivers change rights on some parts of the system: After installing the drivers, applications may launch using root rights, without asking any password. What is more, you may be able to kill your system, by deleting system components, generally modifiable only by using sudo." GerbilSoft adds: "Among the programs that it sets as setuid-root are OpenOffice, xsane, and xscanimage."
Secretly Monopolizing the CPU Without Being Root 250
An anonymous reader writes "This year's
Usenix security symposium
includes a
paper
that implements a "cheat" utility, which allows any non-privileged user to
run his/her program, e.g., like so 'cheat 99% program'
thereby insuring that the programs would get 99% of the CPU
cycles, regardless of the presence of any other applications in the
system, and in some cases (like Linux), in a way that keeps the program
invisible from CPU monitoring tools (like 'top'). The utility exclusively
uses standard interfaces and can be trivially implemented by any
beginner non-privileged programmer. Recent efforts to improve the
support for multimedia applications make systems more susceptible to
the attack.
All prevalent operating systems but Mac OS X are vulnerable, though by
this kerneltrap story,
it appears that the new CFS Linux scheduler attempts to address the
problem that were raised by the paper."
Comment Re:Sooner or later... (Score 2, Insightful) 362
Why would a DALEK want to exterminate it's mirror image?
The only purpose of a DALEK is to rid the cosmos of everything NOT DALEK so that it can become the supreme master of the universe.
The only purpose of a DALEK is to rid the cosmos of everything NOT DALEK so that it can become the supreme master of the universe.
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