Text written by Russ Allbery at 06:34 AM 3/30/99 -0800:
>
>as root. Windows just doesn't have a user other than root.
Exactly! I came to Linux after a long while in the DOS/Windows world,
starting from about DOS 5.0. (I used to be able to optimize DOS' memory
usage well enough that MemMaker, when it finally came out, couldn't beat my
performance. Although I'll admit it could do it faster.)
Then I started dealing with Linux (and, by extension, Unix). At first, of
course, I saw all the things that were different -- "Aack, the file path
separators are backwards!" and "Why is there no drive letter?" and so on.
But then I started to see the things that were the same (although sometimes
with different names). Daemons? TSRs with a cooler name. Shell scripts?
Batch files. And so on.
Eventually, I realized that DOS is essentially a single-user Unix, and a
lot of things clicked into place. The only user is root. File permissions
suddenly become -rwx rather than -rwxrwxrwx, because there *are* not groups
or "other" users. And r means nothing -- you're root; you can read anything
if you want to. And x is automatically set if the extension is .bat, .com
or .exe, so that one can go away. The lack of the w permission becomes the
read-only flag. Tada!
At that point, I felt rather silly about my earlier nervousness over
working at a root prompt. I have *much* more experience working at a root
prompt than someone with decades of Unix experience who only shells to root
once in a long while -- I used to work as root every day on a system that
used backslashes as path separators. :)
Anyway, I'm glad to discover someone else who sees it that way.
>Don't fool yourself that it can't happen to you simply by virtue of
>running a different operating system. The only way it can't happen to you
>is if you always *think* before running random programs on stuff you get
>via untrusted channels.
And again, this is the same thing I've tried to impress on my users. (By
which I mean the Win95 users at my office, not the Linux users.) Sure, I've
made sure everyone's virus scanners are updated, but I've spent a bit more
time trying to educate them about when they should or shouldn't
double-click on an attachment -- or open any other MS Office file that
comes in through any other channel.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Kai MacTane
System Administrator
Online Partners.com, Inc.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
>From the Jargon File: (v4.0.0, 25 Jul 1996)
hyperspace /hi:'per-spays/ /n./
A memory location that is **far** away from where the program counter
should be pointing, especially a place that is inaccessible because
it is not even mapped in by the virtual-memory system. "Another core
dump --- looks like the program jumped off to hyperspace somehow."...
The variant `east hyperspace' is recorded among CMU and Bliss hackers.
