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un sued Microsoft for their Java support in Windows/IE. Microsoft removed (again) the support and we know where Java is today in terms of client-side browser applets. At the same time Microsoft has managed to spread wide their version of Java: .NET.

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=add&group_id= 4421&atid=104421

If they only need to print or save as PDF, use PDFCreator, available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/. It's free, faster, more reliable, and its generated PDF is both smaller and more likely to print well. Of course, it's baed on Ghostscript instead of Adobe's commercial products, but that's life.

Leave Adobe Acrobat for people who need a $500 license for software to create fancy forms.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/ creates a PDF pseudo printer for WinXp. With this, you can use Word, Excel, or any other program that can print, and create PDF docs.

Don't use CutePDF. This is Slashdot. Use PDF Creator.

Or perhaps the open source PDF Creator, available for download on their sourceforge page.

The program simply installs a fake printer that creates PDFs. So any Windows program that can print can also export to PDF.

I make PDFs from Microsoft Word, or any other program with print functionality, on Windows XP all the time. All it takes is PDFCreator. It can also output PNG, JPEG, BMP, PCX, TIFF, PostScript, and Encapsulated PostScript files (only single-page printouts should be made into PNGs, JPEGs, BMPs, and PCXes, however).

I am personally using pdfcreator. It installs as a printer and when I print to it, it pops up a dialog that ask me where I want to save the file. I think it internally prints to ps first, but as a user it is nice not having to call ps2pdf manually. There are other printer drivers that do the same, but I prefer to use an open source one.

I don't get this argument by Adobe. This software, PDFCREATOR, is free and lets you convert any document (including MS Office documents) to PDF.

What's the big deal? Is it that Adobe knows most users don't know that you don't have to buy Adobe Acrobat to make a PDF?


http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

Have you tried PDFCreator? It gives you a printer that lets you make .pdf files from any Windows application. See here.

Standards in Artificial Intelligence include hybrids of neural biology and computer hardware -- where neuro-chips integrate neuronal tissue with a silicon surface.

Our Neurofuture ranges now from enhancement of the human brain-mind to a Vulcan mind-meld of brain and machine.

A Theory of Cognitivity explains how to build the artificial minds of the future -- whether housed in computers or in these new hybrids of chip and nerve-cell.

Primitive AI Engines already exist and need only rapid prototyping along multiple development paths in the race towards True AI and superintelligent AI (SAI).

Expect an AI Landrush to start in the year 2007.

Human-Level AI should be here by 2009.

A Joint Stewardship of Earth under human and cyborg control will render the legal definition of person meaningless, as the citizens of society range from flesh-and-blood humans through all mannner of neurocomputational hybrids to full-metal robots.

The Singularity Timetable predicts a Technological Singularity by the end time of the ancient Mayan calendar in 2012 -- only six neurochip years from now.

Standards in Artificial Intelligence include hybrids of neural biology and computer hardware -- where neuro-chips integrate neuronal tissue with a silicon surface.

Our Neurofuture ranges now from enhancement of the human brain-mind to a Vulcan mind-meld of brain and machine.

A Theory of Cognitivity explains how to build the artificial minds of the future -- whether housed in computers or in these new hybrids of chip and nerve-cell.

Primitive AI Engines already exist and need only rapid prototyping along multiple development paths in the race towards True AI and superintelligent AI (SAI).

Expect an AI Landrush to start in the year 2007.

Human-Level AI should be here by 2009.

A Joint Stewardship of Earth under human and cyborg control will render the legal definition of person meaningless, as the citizens of society range from flesh-and-blood humans through all mannner of neurocomputational hybrids to full-metal robots.

The Singularity Timetable predicts a Technological Singularity by the end time of the ancient Mayan calendar in 2012 -- only six neurochip years from now.

"Pirate Bay will reappear in Ukraine, Russia, The Netherlands and three other countries."

Warez sites are moving about to other countries, and some are even popping up on Freenet now. I think anonymous p2p will be the next main phase.

The first phase was napster (centralized in many respects), then second generation p2p was gnutella and emule, and now the third generation has Freenet, I2P, GNUnet, Rodi, AntsP2P, Mute, etc. Even if you're not interested in the issue the back and forth conflict between the media companies and programmers is interesting - I wonder who'll win out in the end.

"Pirate Bay will reappear in Ukraine, Russia, The Netherlands and three other countries."

Warez sites are moving about to other countries, and some are even popping up on Freenet now. I think anonymous p2p will be the next main phase.

The first phase was napster (centralized in many respects), then second generation p2p was gnutella and emule, and now the third generation has Freenet, I2P, GNUnet, Rodi, AntsP2P, Mute, etc. Even if you're not interested in the issue the back and forth conflict between the media companies and programmers is interesting - I wonder who'll win out in the end.

"Pirate Bay will reappear in Ukraine, Russia, The Netherlands and three other countries."

Warez sites are moving about to other countries, and some are even popping up on Freenet now. I think anonymous p2p will be the next main phase.

The first phase was napster (centralized in many respects), then second generation p2p was gnutella and emule, and now the third generation has Freenet, I2P, GNUnet, Rodi, AntsP2P, Mute, etc. Even if you're not interested in the issue the back and forth conflict between the media companies and programmers is interesting - I wonder who'll win out in the end.

"Pirate Bay will reappear in Ukraine, Russia, The Netherlands and three other countries."

Warez sites are moving about to other countries, and some are even popping up on Freenet now. I think anonymous p2p will be the next main phase.

The first phase was napster (centralized in many respects), then second generation p2p was gnutella and emule, and now the third generation has Freenet, I2P, GNUnet, Rodi, AntsP2P, Mute, etc. Even if you're not interested in the issue the back and forth conflict between the media companies and programmers is interesting - I wonder who'll win out in the end.

Isn't this just glorified static code analysis?

There are tons of static analysis programs out there that look for everything from errors to memory leaks to security weaknesses to gathering code quality metrics to conformance to stylistic standards.

For example I use PMD to help tone up my Java code already. There are even fancier software packages that claim to do more interesting things, but it is all just static analysis.

There's a ton of similar projects listed on PMD's site alone. In fact Eclipse itself employs a lot of static analysis checks to give you those helpful hints and warnings that javac would not catch on its own. And that is just for Java and just for detecting common coding errors. There are whole other categories of these applications that take a higher level look at the architecture.

These kinds of tools are quite common and effective at cutting down on errors when used properly. They can also speed development by avoiding troublesome pitfalls that can take hours or days to debug. Or worse, cause the failure of the project. Just reading through the existing checks these kinds of programs make can educate you on best practices to help prevent writing bad code in the first place.

And before everyone goes "oh yeah, we used that once, pain in the ass," you should read the top best practice on PMD's website. Choose the rules that are right for you. Start slow. Don't turn everything on just to watch thousands of pages of errors fly by when you're only interested in 20 that really matter.

Isn't this just glorified static code analysis?

There are tons of static analysis programs out there that look for everything from errors to memory leaks to security weaknesses to gathering code quality metrics to conformance to stylistic standards.

For example I use PMD to help tone up my Java code already. There are even fancier software packages that claim to do more interesting things, but it is all just static analysis.

There's a ton of similar projects listed on PMD's site alone. In fact Eclipse itself employs a lot of static analysis checks to give you those helpful hints and warnings that javac would not catch on its own. And that is just for Java and just for detecting common coding errors. There are whole other categories of these applications that take a higher level look at the architecture.

These kinds of tools are quite common and effective at cutting down on errors when used properly. They can also speed development by avoiding troublesome pitfalls that can take hours or days to debug. Or worse, cause the failure of the project. Just reading through the existing checks these kinds of programs make can educate you on best practices to help prevent writing bad code in the first place.

And before everyone goes "oh yeah, we used that once, pain in the ass," you should read the top best practice on PMD's website. Choose the rules that are right for you. Start slow. Don't turn everything on just to watch thousands of pages of errors fly by when you're only interested in 20 that really matter.

Isn't this just glorified static code analysis?

There are tons of static analysis programs out there that look for everything from errors to memory leaks to security weaknesses to gathering code quality metrics to conformance to stylistic standards.

For example I use PMD to help tone up my Java code already. There are even fancier software packages that claim to do more interesting things, but it is all just static analysis.

There's a ton of similar projects listed on PMD's site alone. In fact Eclipse itself employs a lot of static analysis checks to give you those helpful hints and warnings that javac would not catch on its own. And that is just for Java and just for detecting common coding errors. There are whole other categories of these applications that take a higher level look at the architecture.

These kinds of tools are quite common and effective at cutting down on errors when used properly. They can also speed development by avoiding troublesome pitfalls that can take hours or days to debug. Or worse, cause the failure of the project. Just reading through the existing checks these kinds of programs make can educate you on best practices to help prevent writing bad code in the first place.

And before everyone goes "oh yeah, we used that once, pain in the ass," you should read the top best practice on PMD's website. Choose the rules that are right for you. Start slow. Don't turn everything on just to watch thousands of pages of errors fly by when you're only interested in 20 that really matter.

No, SCP, SSH, and SFTP all share the fundamental flaw that they do not restructure to an authorized area of the file system. Any improperly secured files are available for download, such as /etc/passwd, and upload is possible to other areas such as /tmp and /var/tmp and any home directories that some fool has set with general write permissions.

It's possible to implement chroot cages for SSH servers to avoid this, but the published ones at http://sourceforge.net/projects/chrootssh are not well written and quite incomplete without hand-rolling your own actual chroot cage building tool. And the OpenSSH authors have made clear repeatedly that they're not willing to accept patches to integrate this function, so it's a dead end in the short term unless you have a lot of time to keep re-implementing it with every OpenSSH release.

Instead, consider WebDAV/HTTPS. WebDAV allows upload to a web server, and over HTTPS it's quite secure and keeps the user restricted to their authorized directories, not the rest of the OS.

I was actually thinking of the IdealX management console:

http://imc.sourceforge.net/home.html

though it's always handy to know of another tool. Really what I'd like is a nice web-based frontend which is easy to integrate everything into - including systems which don't lend themselves to authenticating against LDAP, and overall systems management (ie. things other than user accounts, such as DNS, DHCP, rolling out PCs etc)- but I think sooner or later there's going to be a lot of customisation involved.

unfortunately, this breaks the brilliant synergy2 tool temporarily...

No, print-to-PDF systems like PDFCreator create quite normal PDFs with searchable, selectable, copy-and-paste-to-Notepad-able text.

Another good, open source one is PDFCreator. It's quite fully featured, although I can't compare it to your recommendation as its server seems to be slashdotted.

I haven't had occaision to fiddle around with group membership with the GUI tools. Also, the times when I hit usrmgr heavily was when using the TDB backend, not the LDAP backend, and for some reason I had good luck with that. I think the locking and round-trip complexity of the TDB is simpler so Samba is less likely to screw up when using non-native tools.

I think the web front end you're speaking of is LAM. Looks pretty cool. Also check out "gosa".

...it doesn't require 300megs of crappy Adobe junk to be installed which hogs your system, installs a printer driver, and adds its toolbars to every fucking application.

There is an easier way. See PDFCreator. It's a simple printer driver, doesn't take up but a meg or two, installs no toolbars or nag crap. It just makes PDF files.

It's simple, clean, accurate and elegant, IMHO.

I work for a small non-profit that refurbishes used computers for re-use, and we wipe every hard drive with an 11-pass system. (Probably overkill, DoD specifies just 7). Every volunteer who works on the computers is trained in how to do it, and in the importance of doing so. It doesn't take much person-time: Hook up the hard drive to a computer, boot from the Knoppix CD, and enter the command. A couple of hours later you have a clean safe hard drive with no trace of the original data.

Hmmm... Knoppix is probably overkill. Try DBaN (Darik's Boot and Nuke) instead.

http://tptest.sourceforge.net/

configure firewall so nothing goes in and only what you
want goes out. that is waht make secure system.

--chris
http://nxdos.sourceforge.net/

I used to build some reasonably big servers. Of course, some of these would be used for what would be considered sensitive information. Hard drives that had crashed were tested by our service dept., then by me, then returned to the manufacturer (occasionally overseas). Fucks me what they did with them. I always assumed they re-used good controller boards or just the ICs, but really any lowly paid technician could be stealing information.

When I worked for a hospital I had access to hundreds of machines and servers with sensitive information. There were old hard drives lying around our lab and that came in daily to be destroyed. This was taken pretty seriously, but again, lots of people had access to these drives.

There is sensitive information lying on hard drives What this whole story comes down to, is that some kid was told to 'destroy' a drive and it ended up in his backpack.

It's scary to think of what is floating around out there, given the high number of laptop/etc thefts occuring recently. Every piece of sensitive information on my machines (tax/finances/etc), in case of theft, is encrypted with blowfish. Have a look at bcrypt .

Thank you!

FileZilla is the best ftp program I've found for windows and its open source. http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/

DBAN, Darik's Boot And Nuke. Glancing over the list it has all eh same features of the "pro" one and doesn't cost a dime. Is even OSS, if that kind of thing makes a difference to you.

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

As a public service, links to three excellent, free, software based HDD wiping utilities. The first is even open source ...

Darik's Boot and Nuke
Active Kill Disk
PC Inspector

There should never be an excuse for selling or transfering ownership of a hard drive with pre-existing data when there are fast, free, and convienient utilities that can effectively remove all data without damaging HDD functionality. Physical destruction is of course, the most secure method of permanently wiping data, but for most folks good software based data destruction should be more than sufficient.

Obligatory disclaimer: I am in no way associated with any of the above products except as a satisfied user.

Why pay for a utility when you can use Darik's boot and nuke utility. http://dban.sourceforge.net/

You want Synergy for the keyboard, mouse, and clipboard sharing. Move your mouse to the right edge of LinuxComputer1 and it moves over to the left edge of WindowsComputer2. For the file sharing stuff you're on your own though.

Never mind. The whole thing is out of date already anyway. With Linux broadcatching apps like Democracy Player and KatchTV and Penguin TV, there's really no need to look at those sites again. Just run an app, and choose a show to watch :)

No one seems to have mentioned this yet, so I'll toss in my 2 cents:

With these WinCE thin clients that only run ICA/RDP, you can still make use of them without having a Windows server kicking around. Nice little project called XRDP has been working on an RDP server for Linux (and other *NIX) machines. It works pretty well, although currently it's just a pass-through to a VNC session (they're working on a full RDP server). Makes for some fun issues with Ubuntu as the VNC server sources are configured a bit... oddly... however with a bit of manual tweaking it's a quick (and free!) way to take advantage of these things.

I got into this because I picked up a small, fanless, low power WinCE terminal for a couple of dollars recently - but the same method applies for these new-fangled thin clients.

Why the industry is so obsessed with WinCE and RDP is another matter. Just use PXE, please! The extra couple of MB to download the client software really doesn't make for a slow boot in this day of 100/1000BT ethernet.

Kubuntu 6.06 has also been released and is fully supported by Canonical. You can download it and order free Kubuntu CDs through Shipit.

Kubuntu features the latest version of the ever popular and advanced K Desktop Environment, which has killer apps such as the AmaroK music player, the Kaffeine movie player, the Konqueror file manager and web browser, and the KOffice suite.

if you are okay with non-free then Mainconcept make a pretty decent video editor. On the Free/free front Jahshaka hit rc3(?) recently. On KDE you have KDEnlive....

A good thing to use to get newer versions of packages than the offical one is klik.

http://klik.sourceforge.net/

Why not make some DBAN discs? The CDs load up faster than Knoppix, require less user intervention, have more options than shred (AFAIK anyway -- does shred let you use a seed file?), and you can start wiping the next machine less than 45 seconds after you start wiping.

I hate to have my Knoppix discs tied up on hardware I'm about to get rid of anyway.

If all you want to do is share files then you could try using http://gift.sourceforge.net/ and OpenFT. You should be able to set up a private P2P network for sharing files and it could save you some bandwidth if everybody wants to grab the same file.

Well, I'm not going to argue against VB and I wouldn't have you do that either, but depending on what type of program it is, you might point out VB's weakness on lack of portability. You might think I'm about to jump on the Java bandwagon here, but I'm not. Assuming your superior knows C/C++ you might encourage him to check out wx-Devcpp. It as an interface simular to VisualBasic (and C# for that matter)but gives you the ability to take the code and move it to Linux and other OSes that use the GCC compiler.

I noticed that the Disk Utility in recent releases of MacOS/X also has a paranoia-erase setting: you can tell it to overwrite a disk with zeroes once, seven times, or (for the tinfoil hat crowd) 35 times(!). It's a pretty slow process, though -- doing the 7x option took my G5 about 4 hours. I can almost see now why the military prefers to physically destroy the drives.

Because by reading stories as such we can pay attention to laptop privacy which would be otherwise neglected. By reading you guys comments I found stuffs about sector encryption and something useful which you'd not bother to look for until you need it.
Don't blame us for not RTFA, most of time I found comments useful, informative, and sometime, more intelligent than the original post. :P

I believe most of us hang around and read every story posted for similar reason right? :)

try Darik's Boot and Nuke... http://dban.sourceforge.net/

and dissassembling old hard drives and smashing the platters.


If the hard drive is still operational, just run dban on it and it will be completely unreadable.

If you are selling/sending for repair, either your laptop or storage media, do not forget to take the backup and wipe out the entire content. Simply formatting/deleting the content may not help. The data will be still there, only the index (Allocation table) will be changed.
You can use something like Darik's Boot and Nuke http://dban.sourceforge.net/ for deleting the content permanently.

It's downsides: it's basically just a wrapper for rsync. It requires a lot of babysitting (if your backups fail for some reason, it'll try to do full backups the next day possibly with disasterous consequences as it tries to jam hundreds of gig down your T1). Also, it has to log in as root on all of your boxes, so there are some very careful sercurity considerations.

But a box with a bunch of disks in it, put it off site, and whamo you have a complete backup solution.

For the windows users, I like backuppc. I have never actually used it, but it allows windows users to choose when their backups are taken, and allows them to recover files themselves through a web interface. It's big downside is the cryptic way it stores files internally, making it really hard to extract files without using the web interface.