The initial interface of the Windows 2000 installer bears a strong resemblance to ncurses. I think it's even still there with XP. The long and short of it is, if users want to install any OS (as opposed to just using it) they'll probably have to learn something new, GUI or no.
you are wasting your time. Equipment to recover these files costs on the order of US $2000... you're not stopping many people, huh? When you really want them gone, you should burn your hard disk platters until very little remains and scatter the ashes over the sea.
It's not stupid at all. You are correct in stating that the compiler is not the security flaw. However, if the compiler were not there, this is the 4th worm in the past few months that you wouldn't have been vulnerable to. Simply because they *could* find other means of implementing the worm doesn't mean that you should make this one easy. There are 2 goals here:
Prevent compromise. This is done by disabling unnecessary services and keeping your patch levels current, among other things.
Reduce the impact of compromises that do occur. One way to do this is, much as you disable unnecessary services, only keep the software needed for your application on the box.
As "stupid" as it may seem from an ivory tower perspective, in practice it helps. It's not a first line of defense, but it helps.
No. This is purely an openssl problem. It was patched in July! The "blame" goes with those who don't apply security patches marked as critical. The worm could as easily have been written to attack users of unpatched installations of stunnel-win32, but that wouldn't be nearly as satisfying for a worm-writer as something that can attack apache on linux.
3) Don't install a development environment (e.g. gcc, which is required for this worm to propogate) on a publically exposed web server!
Obviously, this won't work for people with only one box who want to run their personal web server off of it as well as do their dev work there, but for *real* servers this is a good practice. People who must have compilers on their web server are probably not using SSL, as you stated:-).
If you must use a compiler on your web server, FFS run the publically accessible service in a chroot jail!
When there is ink all over the printer due to a leaked refill, it is not difficult to prove that third party ink caused the damage. IMO, the warranty provider would win were you to sue them (IANAL TINLA, etc.), for two reasons:
It's not the warranty provider who refuses service, it is in fact the manufacturer, as the damaged parts must be (in most cases) returned to the manufacturer to receive warranty reimbursement.
The spilled third party refill is usually very obviously the source of the damage. You can tell when a cartridge has been refilled. Usually the customer with the printer voluntarily furnishes that information, but it's visually obvious even when they do not, as the cartridge is punctured in the course of the refill process.
No warranty provider would refuse to service a legitimately defective printer because it has a refilled cartridge in it; the warranty simply doesn't cover the damage stemming from the spilled ink/toner, which is a frequent occurrence with refilled carts.
It's been more than 5 years now, but I used to work repairing printers, and the refills (for both inkjet and laser printers) were bad news. Part of this can be chalked up to poor printer design. Most printers on the market today have the "print head" and the ink tank bundeled into one package, or in the case of laser printers, the imaging drum and the toner bundled into one package. Refills work on the principle that the print head/imaging drum is more durable than the resevoir, so in theory you should be able to replace one without the other.
This is true, on a well-designed printer where the two parts are separate assemblies. (Some canon printers operate this way; a replacement ink tank is only a few dollars while a whole cartridge is ~$30 - 50 US.) The problem is that refills, at least in those days, were difficult to perform correctly. I believe that it is even harder today, as cartridges are more complex while the refill technology doesn't appear to have improved. We used to see a large number of printers come into our shop damaged by improperly performed refills. Of course, in those days this was worse news, as a new inkjet was typically around $300 US and a new cartridge was around $30 US. This is true of a good printer today as well.
In short, if you have a good printer, the refills are not worth it. You most likely will wind up damaging the printer, and of course the warranty does not cover damage from non-approved cartridges/refills. If it's a really cheap printer, the risk/reward scenario is quite different. The cartridges do not last as long on the cheapies, and represent a higher proportion of the cost of the printer. I prefer a nice printer and a lower cost per page, though. If this is your situation, the refills are almost certainly a false economy.
Most of what the majority of non-lawyers need to know about the GPL can be summed up in one line: The GPL does not impact users of the software, only distributors.
That's it. For that simple reason, the premise of this question is flawed. Most of the world simply uses software and doesn't redistribute it, therefore understanding and acceptance of the GNU GPL is not an issue.
Anyone who is distributing software (GPL or otherwise) really needs to take the time to understand the details of their redistribution agreement. As redistribution licenses are concerned, the GPL is very easy to understand and truly does stand out as a marvel of simplicity. The only simpler things are BSD and public domain:-)
They now have real damages to countersue for. I was going to buy one of the units (they really look cool) but now refuse to. I will not submit to this sort of monitoring. Period. They lost my sale. Am I alone? I am sending a message to this effect to privacy@replaytv.com, informing them of this and suggesting the countersuit. Maybe if they get more reports of real damages, a counter-suit will be filed.
The first thing to do is learn how to build Mozilla under Mac OS X... it's rather a bitch, but well documented here. (Actually, it's a bitch to build under Linux too, and that's the easiest platform to build on.) Then apply the ATSUI rendering patch attached to bug 121540 (sorry, can't link to bugzilla from slashdot) and rebuild. Voila! As far as I can see, it looks like it may already be in the nightlies though, and possibly even in 1.0RC1... I haven't looked yet:-). If you find that it's not, I recommend grabbing the build from stevek's iDisk. It's a lot easier than building it if you're not already building mozilla. (I was, for other reasons. Quartz was a nice extra perk.)
As for leaving out all the composer and mail junk, I don't know of a way to do that. However, current builds of chimera are fast, have quartz rendering compiled in, and are browser only. As a bonus, it's got a nice native cocoa interface that gets better and better with every build. It's still got some bugs, but I find it pretty usable.
These are the people who put out Word 6, and you don't doubt that they will?
I agree that Word 6 was a horrible abomination of a product, but these are certainly not the same people who put out Word 6. Word 6 was an attempt to unify the Macintosh and Windows codebases for Office and was done by the Office Windows development team. If you look at versions of MFC from that time period, there are substantial portions of Mac-related stuff in there. Word 6 was built using some sort of cross-development environment, and it was not very well done. The MBU was created (at least partly) due to poor consumer response to Word 6 and its counterparts. If you look at subsequent revisions of Office, it's clear that it's not even the same codebase; they're much better. The MBU is a business proposition, and a good one.
I can see where MS would deliberately cripple it if they viewed it as a competitor, but it simply isn't. It's a revenue center in itself. MBU applications don't compete with Office on Windows; they currently sell to people who would otherwise be getting filters for Appleworks if Office weren't available. Likewise, IE targets people who would otherwise be using OminWeb or Netscape. The business proposition for the MBU is simple: Mac users tend to buy twice as much software per user as Windows users and require far less than half as much in support costs. Furthermore, development is cheaper because narrower system requirements lead to lower QA costs. Moreover, there are no low priced OEM deals for Mac office, so the margin per copy is much higher. It's because it is in Apple's and Microsoft's business interests, not because of any assumed altruism on either corporation's part that I believe they will strive for excellence in their Mac products. If you've seen the latest version of Office, this is evident. It's much, much better than Office XP for Windows. (I trace this to a greater need to sell every copy out there to an end user rather than to corporations that don't want to deviate from a corporate standard or to OEMs that want to check off features and to the higher profit margins inherent in doing so.)
They're right. Almost. It feels a little slow to me, but not unbearably so. Perhaps my tolerance is too high, but I don't feel like I'm sitting around waiting for the system. Or perhaps (since I've been using Mac OS X since the first day of the public beta and Mac OS for several years!) I'm so impressed with the overall improvements to my "computing experience" that have come with Mac OS X that I don't notice *all* of the warts. Frankly, I've had my performance complaints, and the browser hasn't been one of them. Don't get me started on the Finder...
My system is an iMac DV G3/400MHz with 512MB RAM and a 27GB internal HD. Certainly not a performance champ... in fact, except for the RAM it's rather low-end. My point of reference for Wintel is my work PC, an IBM thinkpad 1GHZ, 392MB/32GB running RedHat 7.2 and occasionally booting into Win2k (when I need to edit someone else's MS Project or Visio files). For most operations (checking e-mail, running MS Office, browsing) I don't find that the iMac *feels* slower. Most days, I work from my home office with the two machines sitting side by side. I don't find myself turning to the Thinkpad for browsing; in fact, it's rather the opposite. I do much of my office correspondence on the iMac due to the superiority of the Office implementation for Mac OS X.
Perhaps the reason I don't find it so slow, though, is that I seldom use MSIE. I am not morally opposed to MSIE; I do use office after all, and actually like office V.X. (It's the first version I've liked since the version with Word 5 (Office 4.0?), though I found Office 98 tolerable.) MSIE is just not the best browser for Mac OS X. Its rendering engine is buggy, and it's *SLOW*. By that, I mean that it feels significantly slower than the other browsers I use. I find that I use 3 browsers:
Mozilla - It's reasonably fast. My main complaint is that it takes almost 15 seconds to launch! Once it's launched, I find page loading to be fast and stable. It takes a few seconds to open the preferences panel, but that's no different from Moz on my Linux box, which is faster than my Mac.
Omniweb - It's probably in fact slower than IE, but it feels faster because the threading is better. It doesn't block while it's loading a page, and pages look great because it uses Quartz rendering. It's still slower than Moz, though, even when I compile Quartz rendering into it, and Mozilla has less trouble rendering pages with CSS and Javascript.
Chimera - This one is going to be the best, hands down. It's fast as blazes, even on my hardware. It's the first browser I've used on any other platform that felt as fast as Galeon. It's in a very early dev version, though, and far from feature complete. I like it a lot, so far.
All that said, though, IE is the default, and it's IE that the Mac will be judged on. I think the Moz crew has proven that the performance hit is not all apple's fault, though. Even so, Apple and MS would be well served to ensure that IE and Office are really snappy on Apple's newest hardware and OS combinations. I don't doubt that they will, now that OS development seems to have stabilized somewhat.
Nowhere did I claim that Apple was the first to offer an all-in-one LCD computer (I thought desktop was implied given the subject matter of the article)... I only disputed C|Net's claim that Gateway did it before Apple.
C|Net should check their facts
on
iMac LCD Impostors
·
· Score: 5, Informative
As others have noted, first off, the only similarity here appears to be that they both are all-in-ones with an LCD. The gateway doesn't appear to have any of the "bringing content-creation to the masses" focus that apple does. Moreover, though, the article states that
The Poway, Calif.-based PC maker got into the all-in-one business with its original Profile computer in June 1999 on the coattails of the first iMac. Gateway, however, did beat Apple to the punch with the first all-in-one computer to feature a flat panel.
Apple introduced the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh, which was an all-in-one with an LCD, in May 1997. Oh well... I certainly don't read C|Net for the intelligent reporting. Actually, I'm not sure why I ever click an article that's linked there:-)
Re:Free2TwoGrand (try $1488 to $1499)
on
Penguin2Apple
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Suppose he buys a comparably equipped PC from a reputable manufacturer. Let's say Dell, for the sake of argument.
Dell Dimension 2100:
1100 MHz Celeron Processor
256MB RAM
40GB HD
15" LCD Display
Integrated Intel 3D Graphics
NO IEEE 1394 (firewire) port
Harmon-Kardon HK195 Speakers
DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive
1 year warranty
Total cost: $1488
Apple iMac:
700 MHz PowerPC G4 Processor
256MB RAM
40GB HD
15" LCD Display
nVidia GeForce 2 MX 32MB DDR
Apple Pro (also Harmon-Kardon) speakers
Firewire interface
DVD-ROM/CD-RW Combo drive
1 year warranty
Total Cost: $1499
So if he didn't want firewire, it'd be more like $1488 to $1499 (Or Free2ElevenDollars, as you put it). If he wanted firewire, add $70 for an Adaptec firewire board. If he wanted a better video card, add $60 for the one included in the iMac. In this case, it'd be $1608 for the PC setup to match the iMac, and the package still isn't as nice:-)
So maybe an even better subject would be "Free2OneHundredNineDollarRebate"
Main Entry: [2] ape Function: transitive verb Inflected Form(s): aped; aping Date: 1632 : to copy closely but often clumsily and ineptly synonym see COPY
Slashdot Mirror
The initial interface of the Windows 2000 installer bears a strong resemblance to ncurses. I think it's even still there with XP. The long and short of it is, if users want to install any OS (as opposed to just using it) they'll probably have to learn something new, GUI or no.
you are wasting your time. Equipment to recover these files costs on the order of US $2000... you're not stopping many people, huh? When you really want them gone, you should burn your hard disk platters until very little remains and scatter the ashes over the sea.
It's not stupid at all. You are correct in stating that the compiler is not the security flaw. However, if the compiler were not there, this is the 4th worm in the past few months that you wouldn't have been vulnerable to. Simply because they *could* find other means of implementing the worm doesn't mean that you should make this one easy. There are 2 goals here:
As "stupid" as it may seem from an ivory tower perspective, in practice it helps. It's not a first line of defense, but it helps.
No. This is purely an openssl problem. It was patched in July! The "blame" goes with those who don't apply security patches marked as critical. The worm could as easily have been written to attack users of unpatched installations of stunnel-win32, but that wouldn't be nearly as satisfying for a worm-writer as something that can attack apache on linux.
I would add the following:
3) Don't install a development environment (e.g. gcc, which is required for this worm to propogate) on a publically exposed web server!
Obviously, this won't work for people with only one box who want to run their personal web server off of it as well as do their dev work there, but for *real* servers this is a good practice. People who must have compilers on their web server are probably not using SSL, as you stated :-).
If you must use a compiler on your web server, FFS run the publically accessible service in a chroot jail!
- Go here and click on the Install link to download and install the theme.
- Click on the "View" Menu
- Click on "Apply Theme"
- Click on "Internet Explorer"
- Close all Mozilla windows.
Next time you launch Mozilla, it will use standard Windows controls and look distrubingly like Internet Explorer. Hope this Helps.Actually, you are correct about the mac version but the solaris version does load a win32 implementation just to run correctly.
engine versions incorporate support for hardware cryptographic devices.
Or if you download the mp3s from their site and burn them to a CD, the CD really will be free. As in free.
- It's not the warranty provider who refuses service, it is in fact the manufacturer, as the damaged parts must be (in most cases) returned to the manufacturer to receive warranty reimbursement.
- The spilled third party refill is usually very obviously the source of the damage. You can tell when a cartridge has been refilled. Usually the customer with the printer voluntarily furnishes that information, but it's visually obvious even when they do not, as the cartridge is punctured in the course of the refill process.
No warranty provider would refuse to service a legitimately defective printer because it has a refilled cartridge in it; the warranty simply doesn't cover the damage stemming from the spilled ink/toner, which is a frequent occurrence with refilled carts.It's been more than 5 years now, but I used to work repairing printers, and the refills (for both inkjet and laser printers) were bad news. Part of this can be chalked up to poor printer design. Most printers on the market today have the "print head" and the ink tank bundeled into one package, or in the case of laser printers, the imaging drum and the toner bundled into one package. Refills work on the principle that the print head/imaging drum is more durable than the resevoir, so in theory you should be able to replace one without the other.
This is true, on a well-designed printer where the two parts are separate assemblies. (Some canon printers operate this way; a replacement ink tank is only a few dollars while a whole cartridge is ~$30 - 50 US.) The problem is that refills, at least in those days, were difficult to perform correctly. I believe that it is even harder today, as cartridges are more complex while the refill technology doesn't appear to have improved. We used to see a large number of printers come into our shop damaged by improperly performed refills. Of course, in those days this was worse news, as a new inkjet was typically around $300 US and a new cartridge was around $30 US. This is true of a good printer today as well.
In short, if you have a good printer, the refills are not worth it. You most likely will wind up damaging the printer, and of course the warranty does not cover damage from non-approved cartridges/refills. If it's a really cheap printer, the risk/reward scenario is quite different. The cartridges do not last as long on the cheapies, and represent a higher proportion of the cost of the printer. I prefer a nice printer and a lower cost per page, though. If this is your situation, the refills are almost certainly a false economy.
Most of what the majority of non-lawyers need to know about the GPL can be summed up in one line:
The GPL does not impact users of the software, only distributors.
That's it. For that simple reason, the premise of this question is flawed. Most of the world simply uses software and doesn't redistribute it, therefore understanding and acceptance of the GNU GPL is not an issue.
Anyone who is distributing software (GPL or otherwise) really needs to take the time to understand the details of their redistribution agreement. As redistribution licenses are concerned, the GPL is very easy to understand and truly does stand out as a marvel of simplicity. The only simpler things are BSD and public domain :-)
They now have real damages to countersue for. I was going to buy one of the units (they really look cool) but now refuse to. I will not submit to this sort of monitoring. Period. They lost my sale. Am I alone? I am sending a message to this effect to privacy@replaytv.com, informing them of this and suggesting the countersuit. Maybe if they get more reports of real damages, a counter-suit will be filed.
On the OS's I use most:
HTH-
--pétard
That would be hard. Lotus Notes has had that feature for years. The US PTO refuses to issue patents for which there is so much prior art. Oh, wait...
The first thing to do is learn how to build Mozilla under Mac OS X... it's rather a bitch, but well documented here. (Actually, it's a bitch to build under Linux too, and that's the easiest platform to build on.) Then apply the ATSUI rendering patch attached to bug 121540 (sorry, can't link to bugzilla from slashdot) and rebuild. Voila! As far as I can see, it looks like it may already be in the nightlies though, and possibly even in 1.0RC1... I haven't looked yet :-). If you find that it's not, I recommend grabbing the build from stevek's iDisk. It's a lot easier than building it if you're not already building mozilla. (I was, for other reasons. Quartz was a nice extra perk.)
As for leaving out all the composer and mail junk, I don't know of a way to do that. However, current builds of chimera are fast, have quartz rendering compiled in, and are browser only. As a bonus, it's got a nice native cocoa interface that gets better and better with every build. It's still got some bugs, but I find it pretty usable.
Hope this helps!
I agree that Word 6 was a horrible abomination of a product, but these are certainly not the same people who put out Word 6. Word 6 was an attempt to unify the Macintosh and Windows codebases for Office and was done by the Office Windows development team. If you look at versions of MFC from that time period, there are substantial portions of Mac-related stuff in there. Word 6 was built using some sort of cross-development environment, and it was not very well done. The MBU was created (at least partly) due to poor consumer response to Word 6 and its counterparts. If you look at subsequent revisions of Office, it's clear that it's not even the same codebase; they're much better. The MBU is a business proposition, and a good one.
I can see where MS would deliberately cripple it if they viewed it as a competitor, but it simply isn't. It's a revenue center in itself. MBU applications don't compete with Office on Windows; they currently sell to people who would otherwise be getting filters for Appleworks if Office weren't available. Likewise, IE targets people who would otherwise be using OminWeb or Netscape. The business proposition for the MBU is simple: Mac users tend to buy twice as much software per user as Windows users and require far less than half as much in support costs. Furthermore, development is cheaper because narrower system requirements lead to lower QA costs. Moreover, there are no low priced OEM deals for Mac office, so the margin per copy is much higher. It's because it is in Apple's and Microsoft's business interests, not because of any assumed altruism on either corporation's part that I believe they will strive for excellence in their Mac products. If you've seen the latest version of Office, this is evident. It's much, much better than Office XP for Windows. (I trace this to a greater need to sell every copy out there to an end user rather than to corporations that don't want to deviate from a corporate standard or to OEMs that want to check off features and to the higher profit margins inherent in doing so.)
They're right. Almost. It feels a little slow to me, but not unbearably so. Perhaps my tolerance is too high, but I don't feel like I'm sitting around waiting for the system. Or perhaps (since I've been using Mac OS X since the first day of the public beta and Mac OS for several years!) I'm so impressed with the overall improvements to my "computing experience" that have come with Mac OS X that I don't notice *all* of the warts. Frankly, I've had my performance complaints, and the browser hasn't been one of them. Don't get me started on the Finder...
My system is an iMac DV G3/400MHz with 512MB RAM and a 27GB internal HD. Certainly not a performance champ... in fact, except for the RAM it's rather low-end. My point of reference for Wintel is my work PC, an IBM thinkpad 1GHZ, 392MB/32GB running RedHat 7.2 and occasionally booting into Win2k (when I need to edit someone else's MS Project or Visio files). For most operations (checking e-mail, running MS Office, browsing) I don't find that the iMac *feels* slower. Most days, I work from my home office with the two machines sitting side by side. I don't find myself turning to the Thinkpad for browsing; in fact, it's rather the opposite. I do much of my office correspondence on the iMac due to the superiority of the Office implementation for Mac OS X.
Perhaps the reason I don't find it so slow, though, is that I seldom use MSIE. I am not morally opposed to MSIE; I do use office after all, and actually like office V.X. (It's the first version I've liked since the version with Word 5 (Office 4.0?), though I found Office 98 tolerable.) MSIE is just not the best browser for Mac OS X. Its rendering engine is buggy, and it's *SLOW*. By that, I mean that it feels significantly slower than the other browsers I use. I find that I use 3 browsers:
All that said, though, IE is the default, and it's IE that the Mac will be judged on. I think the Moz crew has proven that the performance hit is not all apple's fault, though. Even so, Apple and MS would be well served to ensure that IE and Office are really snappy on Apple's newest hardware and OS combinations. I don't doubt that they will, now that OS development seems to have stabilized somewhat.
Bugzilla says:
"Sorry, links to Bugzilla from Slashdot are disabled."
in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard."
(with apologies to Douglas Adams)
Nowhere did I claim that Apple was the first to offer an all-in-one LCD computer (I thought desktop was implied given the subject matter of the article)... I only disputed C|Net's claim that Gateway did it before Apple.
Apple introduced the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh, which was an all-in-one with an LCD, in May 1997. Oh well... I certainly don't read C|Net for the intelligent reporting. Actually, I'm not sure why I ever click an article that's linked there
Dell Dimension 2100:
Total cost: $1488
Apple iMac:
Total Cost: $1499
So if he didn't want firewire, it'd be more like $1488 to $1499 (Or Free2ElevenDollars, as you put it). If he wanted firewire, add $70 for an Adaptec firewire board. If he wanted a better video card, add $60 for the one included in the iMac. In this case, it'd be $1608 for the PC setup to match the iMac, and the package still isn't as nice
So maybe an even better subject would be "Free2OneHundredNineDollarRebate"
From m-w.com:
Main Entry: [2] ape
Function: transitive verb
Inflected Form(s): aped; aping
Date: 1632
: to copy closely but often clumsily and ineptly
synonym see COPY