I know for a fact that they're getting easier. The Maths A-level requires students to choose 6 'modules'. A while ago (the year after I did my maths A-level), they went and split 3 modules into 4 smaller modules, thus meaning that students only had to learn 5/6 as much of the syllabus to get the same grades in an exam; the year after me therefore had exams which were pretty much objectively easier.
I'm using a Dell-preloaded-with-Ubuntu (originally Feisty) at the moment. There wasn't any adware on it as far as I could tell, just stock Ubuntu which seemed to have been installed straight off the CD. It also has Windows keys (mapped to Super), and it came with manuals describing Windows XP; I got the impression that they'd just got one of their Windows computers, put an Ubuntu LiveCD in, and clicked Install. (Of course, they probably do more than that.) No adware that I could see, though; there's a clickthrough on first run (I think the EULAs for something non-FLOSS on there, possibly proprietary drivers, or possibly just for the clickthrough itself; that would be ironic!), however. I'm slightly surprised it didn't come with 915resolution pre-installed; the screen's a widescreen but it's stuck in 1024x768 until that package is installed. Of course, Dell have upgraded to Gutsy on their preinstalls since I got my laptop, so maybe things are different now. Would someone with a Dell-preinstalled-Gutsy laptop care to comment?
Umm... you're meant to mod things up if they're wrong, so as to encourage people to rebut them. If something's wrong, you don't censor it, you reply to it. That's why there are no downmods for wrong comments. (Although I think a +1, Wrong would be useful for such situations.)
Personally, I don't think Vista is necessarily all that bad. The problem is, it's not aimed at Windows users. I admire Microsoft for trying to do UAC; it's probably the best that can be managed given Windows' history (most people are used to everything running as admin by default). My Ubuntu laptop has much the same concept (Linux distributions got there first; many OS features in all three major OS groups are copied off other OSs, and that's not a bad thing), but somehow it's not annoying there, because the applications are designed for it. On Windows, it is annoying, but that isn't Vista's fault. However, the sort of people who appreciate the increased security are not the sort of people for who Windows is the best operating system. Vista (apart from the themes, which I find ugly and so would turn off, but I'm strange with aesthetics, seeing as I prefer Windows 95's colour scheme to either XPs or Vistas, and actually like the default Ubuntu brown) is an improvement over XP in many ways (e.g. default sandboxing of Internet Explorer) - but the minority, like me, who would appreciate those improvements have mostly already switched to Linux. Unfortunately, these improvements are accompanied by problems which are all too visible to a typical untechnical user; lack of drivers, massive disk usage, requirement for a powerful computer (N.B. Vista using all your memory is not a problem, it's good for OSs to utilise all your memory in an appropriate way, but needing a lot of memory to run acceptably is another matter), UAC prompts they don't understand the reason for. So the issue is: yes, many people would prefer Vista to XP, but those people have already switched to Linux. The much larger number of people who don't like the sort of differences Linux has won't like Vista either. Maybe Microsoft thought that the nontechnical people were going to stick with Windows no matter what, so shifting to be more like Linux would help; but if they did that, they forgot about Mac OS X, which is gaining fast at the moment, and seems like a reasonable operating system for alienated Windows users to switch to, in addition to being a good operating system for a whole set of people who like to use Macs for various reasons. Meanwhile, it seems very unlikely that the sort of users who use Linux through choice would then switch to Vista despite not liking XP, for various reasons which will become apparent when reading Slashdot for a few weeks.
Well, you could typo-squat non-existent TLDs. I've been known to typo on TLDs before. Also, someone with those sort of resources could probably direct.com to a mirror that gave much the same results, but typosquatted, as you suggested.
Anyway, my personal theory is that someone hijacked the L root server's old IP address, and then posted to Slashdot to figure out what to do with it...
Wasn't it just a few weeks ago that the OpenOffice 3 announcements were made, including partial VBA support for the Mac version? Microsoft seem to be happy to drop VBA support from the Mac version to try to persuade people who rely on it to switch to Windows, but to add it back when that reason no longer applies, so as not to lose marketshare to the reason that it no longer applies... (And yes, there were other office suites that could do that beforehand, but businesses are at least likely to have heard of OpenOffice.org/StarOffice.)
"is easily defeated by the end user with Firefox and "NoScript"." Well, that protects the end user from the compromised server, but not the compromised server from the compromising script.
This is not really a vulnerability in IIS, but it is a design decision that means the compromising script can exploit vulnerabilities in badly-written webapps more easily, so it's slightly Microsoft's fault. It's mostly the fault of all the developers who don't know or don't care about SQL injection, though. The same sort of attack could work against any make of server (because it exploits vulnerabilities in the code running on that server), but would be less easy to automate. And of course, the final end-user-compromising vulnerability has to target the end user, who ought to be protected against malicious websites, but many of who won't be...
That CAPTCHA strikes me as being easier for a computer than for a human. Recognising upside-down cats when they're always pixel-for-pixel the same is quite easy, and likewise for the letters the cats are next to.
Yes, things like lock-in (which Microsoft is good at generating lots of) count as 'goodwill' too; the fact that customers currently use your software and therefore want to / have to / don't know anything else than to use Microsoft software is worth a lot of value to Microsoft. The estimated value of this will show up as 'goodwill' in Microsoft's accounts, and is likely to be worth a lot of money to them. If Microsoft didn't have any lock-in, and people did not currently use their products, it seems unlikely that Microsoft products would gain a substantial market share from a hypothetical other dominant company or platform unless they were improved.
I've had success before now renaming a Works spreadsheet from.xlr to.xls (just changing the extension, the operation that people are supposed to do because they don't understand how file types work) and then opening with OpenOffice; I'm not sure if this is because the two formats are similar enough that OpenOffice can decode both of them the same way or if the.xls just tells it to load some Microsoft-format converters it has, though. It wasn't complex formatting, though (is that even possible in Works?).
It seems that Microsoft made the decision to extend XP based on an attempt to prevent manufacturers switching, after previously ignoring pleas from the end-users to extend XP. The issue seems to be that they're more interested in selling software (such as Vista) even to people who don't want it than they are in selling software to people who do want it; Vista helps to drive the upgrade train, and XP doesn't, so until the low-cost laptops came off the ground continuing XP would presumably have been seen as a huge evil from Microsoft's point of view. It's the manufacturers that Microsoft are trying to please, not the manufacturer's customers (note that retail versions of XP will no longer be available), and only because they had a real alternative (Linux in this case); this strategy may end up backfiring in the long term, because if retailers are prevented from listening to their customers as long as they stay with Microsoft, they may eventually have enough incentive to change, so as not to lose revenue.
I still check to make sure that there aren't any floppy disks left in the drives before I power-on (and I still have floppy drives, even an external one for the laptop); it seems now the old habits may have a reason. Of course, nowadays malware doesn't have to rely on floppy disks accidentally left in drives and sharing of executables from one computer to another because the Internet exists; but that doesn't stop the old threats working, just provides a more modern alternative that gets more attention.
As far as I can tell, the reason Vista is not catching on is this: apart from easily dismissable eye-candy, the improvements that Vista have over XP (and there are improvements) are the sort of thing that only appeals to the comparatively small number of people who switched several years ago to some version of Linux (I don't think Vista is a good OS for the sort of people who would switch to a Mac instead). Windows XP sold well because it was like Windows, and it was sufficiently similar to what Windows users wanted, and sufficiently aggressively marketed, that it became a standard amongst those people. Microsoft are now presumably trying to shift their focus to win back people from Linux (probably businesses rather than home users); but that isn't likely to do all that well, because they don't really understand the market that Linux has captured, and in the meantime they're losing their (currently much larger) core market to older versions of Windows, and to a smaller extent to Apple. So this is probably an issue of complacency about the core market. Meanwhile, Linux distributions are catching on by becoming more 'mainstream', and Apple is gaining from Microsoft's disregard for its core users, whilst not losing many of their fans. (Other operating systems amount to a sufficiently small fraction that they aren't particularly relevant to the argument, but I'm sure they could be factored in too.)
You must be using Debian, or some other Linux or UNIX-like distribution that doesn't contain chapter 2 of the manual by default. It's a syscall, not a command.
$ man 2 seteuid
"seteuid() sets the effective user ID of the current process. Unprivileged user processes may only set the effective user ID to the real user ID, the effective user ID or the saved set-user-ID."
Setting the real UID as well as the effective UID would strike me as being a better way to drop permissions, but unfortunately you need enhanced permissions to do that in the first place. I suspect the sandboxing idea was something like running a process as setuid to a user of lower permission than yourself (which gives you a lower effective UID then real UID), using your real UID to open the window and then using setreuid (also in section 2 of the manual) to set your real (normal user privileges) UID to your effective (low privileges) UID, which is irreversible on that execution of the program without knowing a user or root password. Unfortunately, doing this requires changes to the source code of the browser if the relevant code isn't there already, because the UID changes have to be after the browser opens. However, doing it that way doesn't require root permissions to be involved anywhere, just for the browser executable to be setuid (some low-permissioned account). (I suspect things aren't done this way by default because users don't want to have to type in their own password just to be able to upload files.)
From the PDF: "This personal invasion is a crime in virtually every state in the country".
So which states do allow unlicensed private investigators to remotely investigate someone else's hard drive to look for music recordings? If none of them did, then the lawyers would likely have been stronger in their claims.
They did. Try holding down shift when clicking on the A; the entire page will be replaced with the list in the popup, so you can use your browser's scrollbar to scroll through the list, and/or copy/paste the list elsewhere.
The simplfied non-IE version is actually a lot more reliable than the full IE version. I know of an Outlook Web Access account which nearly always fails with a JS error when attempting to load the page in IE, but works fine in Firefox; this is because the IE version is buggy but the non-IE version isn't (although less functional); I know of another which used to exhibit these symptoms a while ago, although nowadays both versions work. "Providing only basic functionality to non-IE clients", in this case, has actually backfired by making Firefox more useful than IE for accessing the page.
First of all, your assertion that you can simply remove Firefox from Ubuntu Desktop is incorrect. Oh, you can remove it... but you must remove the package 'ubuntu-desktop', which depends on firefox! This will result in autoremoval of a lot of other packages (if you are doing autoremoval) and the failure to track some updates to ubuntu. Not quite correct; it removes ubuntu-desktop (which is correct, because you no longer have all the desktop applications), but that doesn't result in autoremoval of other packages, and its only effect on updates is to prevent new applications being added if they're part of ubuntu-desktop (because as you've asked for one application that's in the bundle to be removed, it no longer tries to maintain the bundle to be complete). (This comment isn't based on firefox in ubuntu-desktop in particular; my personal experience is with the kde usplash package in kubuntu-desktop, but I see no reason why the package removal rules would be different for different sets of packaging.)
Ubuntu's auto-update works like sudo, that is, it asks you for your own password rather than the root password (because there isn't a root password on Ubuntu). You still need to be in the admin group, but that's common practice for home users (unlike in Windows, admin-group users in Ubuntu can't do anything that a normal user could do without a sudo or the graphical equivalent, the right just makes it possible to sudo).
According to Wikipedia, this is actually true, so I don't know why it was modded 'Funny', maybe because it's true and funny; Wikipedia gives http://www.cdi.org/blair/permissive-action-links.cfm as the source. The combination was actually 00000000, but that isn't really much safer. (They apparently changed this rule about 30 years ago, so you can't take advantage of it nowadays.)
Slashdot Mirror
Man! Was that joke ever funning circa 1997...
Yes, nowadays everyone has the 2GB of RAM, due to Windows Vista, so it isn't a problem.Link to Windows version of Wine: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=6241&package_id=112520 Yes, there is one. Some Windows programs run better under Wine than under Windows, after all; it would be a shame if all those Windows users missed out on them.
I know for a fact that they're getting easier. The Maths A-level requires students to choose 6 'modules'. A while ago (the year after I did my maths A-level), they went and split 3 modules into 4 smaller modules, thus meaning that students only had to learn 5/6 as much of the syllabus to get the same grades in an exam; the year after me therefore had exams which were pretty much objectively easier.
I'm using a Dell-preloaded-with-Ubuntu (originally Feisty) at the moment. There wasn't any adware on it as far as I could tell, just stock Ubuntu which seemed to have been installed straight off the CD. It also has Windows keys (mapped to Super), and it came with manuals describing Windows XP; I got the impression that they'd just got one of their Windows computers, put an Ubuntu LiveCD in, and clicked Install. (Of course, they probably do more than that.) No adware that I could see, though; there's a clickthrough on first run (I think the EULAs for something non-FLOSS on there, possibly proprietary drivers, or possibly just for the clickthrough itself; that would be ironic!), however. I'm slightly surprised it didn't come with 915resolution pre-installed; the screen's a widescreen but it's stuck in 1024x768 until that package is installed. Of course, Dell have upgraded to Gutsy on their preinstalls since I got my laptop, so maybe things are different now. Would someone with a Dell-preinstalled-Gutsy laptop care to comment?
Umm... you're meant to mod things up if they're wrong, so as to encourage people to rebut them. If something's wrong, you don't censor it, you reply to it. That's why there are no downmods for wrong comments. (Although I think a +1, Wrong would be useful for such situations.)
Personally, I don't think Vista is necessarily all that bad. The problem is, it's not aimed at Windows users. I admire Microsoft for trying to do UAC; it's probably the best that can be managed given Windows' history (most people are used to everything running as admin by default). My Ubuntu laptop has much the same concept (Linux distributions got there first; many OS features in all three major OS groups are copied off other OSs, and that's not a bad thing), but somehow it's not annoying there, because the applications are designed for it. On Windows, it is annoying, but that isn't Vista's fault. However, the sort of people who appreciate the increased security are not the sort of people for who Windows is the best operating system. Vista (apart from the themes, which I find ugly and so would turn off, but I'm strange with aesthetics, seeing as I prefer Windows 95's colour scheme to either XPs or Vistas, and actually like the default Ubuntu brown) is an improvement over XP in many ways (e.g. default sandboxing of Internet Explorer) - but the minority, like me, who would appreciate those improvements have mostly already switched to Linux. Unfortunately, these improvements are accompanied by problems which are all too visible to a typical untechnical user; lack of drivers, massive disk usage, requirement for a powerful computer (N.B. Vista using all your memory is not a problem, it's good for OSs to utilise all your memory in an appropriate way, but needing a lot of memory to run acceptably is another matter), UAC prompts they don't understand the reason for. So the issue is: yes, many people would prefer Vista to XP, but those people have already switched to Linux. The much larger number of people who don't like the sort of differences Linux has won't like Vista either. Maybe Microsoft thought that the nontechnical people were going to stick with Windows no matter what, so shifting to be more like Linux would help; but if they did that, they forgot about Mac OS X, which is gaining fast at the moment, and seems like a reasonable operating system for alienated Windows users to switch to, in addition to being a good operating system for a whole set of people who like to use Macs for various reasons. Meanwhile, it seems very unlikely that the sort of users who use Linux through choice would then switch to Vista despite not liking XP, for various reasons which will become apparent when reading Slashdot for a few weeks.
If it's apt-ly named, then why does it have a new package format?
Well, you could typo-squat non-existent TLDs. I've been known to typo on TLDs before. Also, someone with those sort of resources could probably direct .com to a mirror that gave much the same results, but typosquatted, as you suggested.
Anyway, my personal theory is that someone hijacked the L root server's old IP address, and then posted to Slashdot to figure out what to do with it...
Wasn't it just a few weeks ago that the OpenOffice 3 announcements were made, including partial VBA support for the Mac version? Microsoft seem to be happy to drop VBA support from the Mac version to try to persuade people who rely on it to switch to Windows, but to add it back when that reason no longer applies, so as not to lose marketshare to the reason that it no longer applies... (And yes, there were other office suites that could do that beforehand, but businesses are at least likely to have heard of OpenOffice.org/StarOffice.)
To get to your point, IMO saying that OO.o is somehow "better" at math is an overstatement.
But it can multiply 850 by 77.1 correctly. I'd call that better at math.
"is easily defeated by the end user with Firefox and "NoScript"." Well, that protects the end user from the compromised server, but not the compromised server from the compromising script. This is not really a vulnerability in IIS, but it is a design decision that means the compromising script can exploit vulnerabilities in badly-written webapps more easily, so it's slightly Microsoft's fault. It's mostly the fault of all the developers who don't know or don't care about SQL injection, though. The same sort of attack could work against any make of server (because it exploits vulnerabilities in the code running on that server), but would be less easy to automate. And of course, the final end-user-compromising vulnerability has to target the end user, who ought to be protected against malicious websites, but many of who won't be...
That CAPTCHA strikes me as being easier for a computer than for a human. Recognising upside-down cats when they're always pixel-for-pixel the same is quite easy, and likewise for the letters the cats are next to.
Yes, things like lock-in (which Microsoft is good at generating lots of) count as 'goodwill' too; the fact that customers currently use your software and therefore want to / have to / don't know anything else than to use Microsoft software is worth a lot of value to Microsoft. The estimated value of this will show up as 'goodwill' in Microsoft's accounts, and is likely to be worth a lot of money to them. If Microsoft didn't have any lock-in, and people did not currently use their products, it seems unlikely that Microsoft products would gain a substantial market share from a hypothetical other dominant company or platform unless they were improved.
I've had success before now renaming a Works spreadsheet from .xlr to .xls (just changing the extension, the operation that people are supposed to do because they don't understand how file types work) and then opening with OpenOffice; I'm not sure if this is because the two formats are similar enough that OpenOffice can decode both of them the same way or if the .xls just tells it to load some Microsoft-format converters it has, though. It wasn't complex formatting, though (is that even possible in Works?).
It seems that Microsoft made the decision to extend XP based on an attempt to prevent manufacturers switching, after previously ignoring pleas from the end-users to extend XP. The issue seems to be that they're more interested in selling software (such as Vista) even to people who don't want it than they are in selling software to people who do want it; Vista helps to drive the upgrade train, and XP doesn't, so until the low-cost laptops came off the ground continuing XP would presumably have been seen as a huge evil from Microsoft's point of view. It's the manufacturers that Microsoft are trying to please, not the manufacturer's customers (note that retail versions of XP will no longer be available), and only because they had a real alternative (Linux in this case); this strategy may end up backfiring in the long term, because if retailers are prevented from listening to their customers as long as they stay with Microsoft, they may eventually have enough incentive to change, so as not to lose revenue.
I still check to make sure that there aren't any floppy disks left in the drives before I power-on (and I still have floppy drives, even an external one for the laptop); it seems now the old habits may have a reason. Of course, nowadays malware doesn't have to rely on floppy disks accidentally left in drives and sharing of executables from one computer to another because the Internet exists; but that doesn't stop the old threats working, just provides a more modern alternative that gets more attention.
As far as I can tell, the reason Vista is not catching on is this: apart from easily dismissable eye-candy, the improvements that Vista have over XP (and there are improvements) are the sort of thing that only appeals to the comparatively small number of people who switched several years ago to some version of Linux (I don't think Vista is a good OS for the sort of people who would switch to a Mac instead). Windows XP sold well because it was like Windows, and it was sufficiently similar to what Windows users wanted, and sufficiently aggressively marketed, that it became a standard amongst those people. Microsoft are now presumably trying to shift their focus to win back people from Linux (probably businesses rather than home users); but that isn't likely to do all that well, because they don't really understand the market that Linux has captured, and in the meantime they're losing their (currently much larger) core market to older versions of Windows, and to a smaller extent to Apple. So this is probably an issue of complacency about the core market. Meanwhile, Linux distributions are catching on by becoming more 'mainstream', and Apple is gaining from Microsoft's disregard for its core users, whilst not losing many of their fans. (Other operating systems amount to a sufficiently small fraction that they aren't particularly relevant to the argument, but I'm sure they could be factored in too.)
You must be using Debian, or some other Linux or UNIX-like distribution that doesn't contain chapter 2 of the manual by default. It's a syscall, not a command. $ man 2 seteuid "seteuid() sets the effective user ID of the current process. Unprivileged user processes may only set the effective user ID to the real user ID, the effective user ID or the saved set-user-ID." Setting the real UID as well as the effective UID would strike me as being a better way to drop permissions, but unfortunately you need enhanced permissions to do that in the first place. I suspect the sandboxing idea was something like running a process as setuid to a user of lower permission than yourself (which gives you a lower effective UID then real UID), using your real UID to open the window and then using setreuid (also in section 2 of the manual) to set your real (normal user privileges) UID to your effective (low privileges) UID, which is irreversible on that execution of the program without knowing a user or root password. Unfortunately, doing this requires changes to the source code of the browser if the relevant code isn't there already, because the UID changes have to be after the browser opens. However, doing it that way doesn't require root permissions to be involved anywhere, just for the browser executable to be setuid (some low-permissioned account). (I suspect things aren't done this way by default because users don't want to have to type in their own password just to be able to upload files.)
From the PDF: "This personal invasion is a crime in virtually every state in the country". So which states do allow unlicensed private investigators to remotely investigate someone else's hard drive to look for music recordings? If none of them did, then the lawyers would likely have been stronger in their claims.
They did. Try holding down shift when clicking on the A; the entire page will be replaced with the list in the popup, so you can use your browser's scrollbar to scroll through the list, and/or copy/paste the list elsewhere.
The simplfied non-IE version is actually a lot more reliable than the full IE version. I know of an Outlook Web Access account which nearly always fails with a JS error when attempting to load the page in IE, but works fine in Firefox; this is because the IE version is buggy but the non-IE version isn't (although less functional); I know of another which used to exhibit these symptoms a while ago, although nowadays both versions work. "Providing only basic functionality to non-IE clients", in this case, has actually backfired by making Firefox more useful than IE for accessing the page.
1. Write software
2. Open-source software
3. Ask Slashdot for advice
4. ???
5. Profit!
Ubuntu's auto-update works like sudo, that is, it asks you for your own password rather than the root password (because there isn't a root password on Ubuntu). You still need to be in the admin group, but that's common practice for home users (unlike in Windows, admin-group users in Ubuntu can't do anything that a normal user could do without a sudo or the graphical equivalent, the right just makes it possible to sudo).
According to Wikipedia, this is actually true, so I don't know why it was modded 'Funny', maybe because it's true and funny; Wikipedia gives http://www.cdi.org/blair/permissive-action-links.cfm as the source. The combination was actually 00000000, but that isn't really much safer. (They apparently changed this rule about 30 years ago, so you can't take advantage of it nowadays.)