Think about it; one can often give the impression of doing work simply by being an active presence in the office. With telecommuting, the only way to show productivity is with e-mails, phone calls and actual files sent back and forth.
This is precisely why I'm trying to bring more 'Open sourceish' development practices in-house. All code gets checked into a CVS server, all announcements should be done via email mailing lists to show who's talking to clients, who's coming up with ideas, and who's writing them. By having telecommuting employees they're -forced- to function this way. No longer can a guy who sits in his chair for 10 hours a day look more important when they've only checked in 2,000 lines of code and on a few modules, when somebody who's there for far less time checks in 10,000 lines of code and completes block after block of code.
Nope...I'm -NOT- the most efficient coder at my place of work. But given the manner in which I've basically forced the past few projects to run I can prove I'm not:)
Quick comment on the BEFSR41 as I've dealt with them for a few people who I know that have purchased them. It's a pretty slick little product (coming from a guy who uses a full-fledged Linux box for his firewall at home) and if I didn't have the need to do filesharing and CVS with the same server I'd just have ditched it for one of these little puppies a long time ago.
However, I have noticed a little quirky bug that caused me a few hour's trouble with it once. When changing the LAN IP from something other than the default 192.168.1.1 you'll have to power-cycle or get a paperclip out and smack the little indented 'reset' button on it to get things to take effect - sometimes more than once. I'd say for 95/100 home users this isn't something they'd ever try and do but it was frustrating.
Why? Well we were trying to route a class C block of IPs through the thing to stage an ISP until the T1 could be delivered. Ended up just getting a Cisco 600 series for the task. The Linksys is still used though to provide a NAT for the office though behind the Cisco (which could do NAT too -- but that little box is just -so- easy to setup).
Original Response: If you had read any physics books instead of letting Hollywood educate you - you would know that firing a gun in a plane a high altitude is a bad thing. Key words: Depressurization, oxygen starvation, fainting, death. What's so much better with that?
Rebuttal: And for the "Hollywood education" comment, when's the last time you went to a shooting range with retired marines, police officers and NRA certified teachers?
Your interpretation:
Obviously your a fanatic and lost all credibility with that statement.
How in the world does making an effort to train oneself on the physical attributes and handling of weapons by people with vast experience make me a fanatic? I have no idea in the world -how- you gathered from my comment that I thought there were marined, police offices, and NRA instructors aboard that plane, nor was I insinuating that any of the above catergories have valid political views -- only that they know how guns operate and know how to use them. So, logically, if I -had- been education by Hollywood I would no longer be a "fanatic". as you put it. Did you even -read- the post or auto-respond as soon as the acronym NRA came up?
If you had read any physics books instead of letting Hollywood educate you - you would know that firing a gun in a plane a high altitude is a bad thing. Key words: Depressurization, oxygen starvation, fainting, death. What's so much better with that?
Please, educate me then. Dig up the specs on a Boeing 757 and 767 and find out how many places a 9mm 115grain jacketed hollow point will go through. While you're at it run the numbers on a.45 230grain JHP, and full metal jacket (FMJ) for both rounds. Heck, throw in a.38 special round or two too.
And don't tell me it wouldn't happen in America,...
IIRC New Hampshire has nearly no gun control as far as carrying a weapon goes. If you can own it, you can carry it, concealed or unconcealed. By all means, dig up some statistics that show gun toting New Hampshie residents are blowing people away left and right.
And for the "Hollywood education" comment, when's the last time you went to a shooting range with retired marines, police officers and NRA certified teachers?
I agree that the position sounds a bit alarming, but really it's quite logical.
For crying out loud, the terrorists apparently took over the plane with -knives-. I'm guessing ceramic ones, so they could slip past the metal detectors. How in the world a plane full of 50-90 people were unable (or unwilling) to confront 3-5 "armed" people is beyond me. To me this is just evidence that the average American citizen is now nothing more than a fattened coward who thinks freeom and peace come without any work. That's the government's job, right?
I am getting absolutely sick of people being called crazy for having firearms and ammunition "just in case.". You may think ESR is nuts for wanting armed citizens on planes, I think everybody else is nuts for NOT wanting them. The founding fathers would probably shit a brick to find out that 90 citizens weren't able to overpower a team of 5 because none of the law abiding people had any sort of weapon on them -- even more appauled that they could pull it off with knives. I'm standing here today not under British rule (not that I think Britians are bad) because armed citizens revolted against a tyranical government.
People often spout off silly examples of one lunatic pulling out their gun and dropping a few people just because they're pissed off. Give me a freaking break. Do you -really- think somebody is going to pull out a gun for some silly-assed reason when it's encouraged for the average citizen to carry a gun? I really doubt it, unless they're criminally insane and have a death wish. Remember the shooting in a NYC subway a few years ago when some loon hopped on board with a semi-automatic handgun and rattled off 30 shots? Lets do some math here:
If memory serves he was using some type of 9mm pistol with 15 round clips. Lets say this guy really knew his stuff and could rattle off a shot every.2 seconds; that's 3 seconds per clip (you have to be -trained- to do something like that BTW, it's far more likely it would have taken him.5 seconds or more). So, that's 3 second, clip empty, getting the next one in would take another 3 seconds (at least), then empty that one out. Total operation: 9 seconds.... for what I could consider somebody well trained. An armed passenger, who is also well trained, could have likely removed his weapon from a concealed position and fired two shots into his chest within 2 seconds... stopping the bulk of the killing.
So, allow passengers to carry? Nope, ban anything that holds more than 10 rounds. Honestly, what kind of logic is this? Granted, you can still buy guns which hold more than 10 rounds, and you can buy the clips too; but only used clips. Now what used to cost 20 dollars for a piece of metal and plastic can run you anywhere from 50-150 depending on the type of gun you're looking for.
There's outrage that gas prices were jacked up when people paniced and began filling up their tanks "just in case." At the same time, K-mart pulls it's firearms and ammunition off the shelves to look like a good guy. Good guy my ass. If somebody had turned off the gas at their gas station for fear of somebody building a bomb we'd consider the gas station owner crazy. K-mart pulls their guns and nobody seems to really give a rat's behind. The country is under attack and you intentionally keep people from buying arms and ammunition? Re-read that sentence again -- let it sink in. I will never set foot in K-mart again; and I do intend on writing a nice calm letter to their head office when this is all said and done.
Given that the nation has received the ugly end of an act of War I would consider ESR's piece right on topic, not "hardly appropriate". Yes, there was a tragedy yesterday. Yes, perhaps ESR is taking this opportunity to point of why he thinks his view is right, but I don't consider his opinion any less valid than discussion of any other anti-terrorism measures the government is thinking about taking. The rules of engagement have changed. Citizens are being treated as if they're military soldiers -- so act like it. Don't own a guy? Buy one, learn how to use it. Go grab a few hundred rounds of ammo and put them in your closet. If you can in your state, carry it wherever you feel comfortable carrying a weapon.
Ever heard of the viso-ish tool called 'Dia'? It's a GTK based application, with ports to Win32. It stores all of it's diagrams in an XML format nativly. It's not as robust as Visio, but it diagrams all my thoughts out rather nicely and I can send them over to all the other developers using Win32 platforms.
Sounds like a nice system -- and a well organized team. You hiring?:)
I once watched a few under age drinkers in court getting sentenced for MIPs in Michigan. One kid actually said to the judge, "Well, it wasn't exactly in my -posession-." The judge then asked him where it was... "In my stomach." was the reply.
The judge wasn't amused. His reply was simply "That still counts.".
Summary: IIS alone is providing holes for the MS platform at a rate that exceeds -every- popular *nix based product right now
Do I have any numbers for this? Nope... I'll leave that for somebody else to dig up. I'm a BugTraq reader, and I'm amazed at the sheer number of serious IIS eploits that have recently been coming out. I haven't seen anything new in the past few weeks, which is good, but take a look at the sheer number of buffer overflows alone that have been found in IIS lately. I bet it's more, or really close, to the total number of buffer overflows found in things like sendmail, bind, apache, and event telnetd in the same time span.
As a programmer I'm appauled here by IIS. Buffer overflows are old, but they keep coming back up. IIS is a new product, most likely written entirely in C++, which should be making the string handling much simpler than the C counter parts. These IIS holes are coming but due to either laziness, incompetence, or indifference in the MS coders parts. Theese aren't obscure either. You request a long URL and you overflow a buffer? 'Cmon here. The URL is coming from untrusted users -always-. Access point #1 into the system isn't even being looked at for possible holes... over and over.
One would think (read: hope) that MS has got a slew of people over-looking all areas of IIS for possible buffer overflows right now. Maybe they'll actually fix some before they're found? Doubtful... given their track record of re-active security.
Justin Buist
Re:More information?
on
Code Red III
·
· Score: 4, Informative
There were/are three versions actually. Incarnations 1 and 2 had the same purpose though. CRv1a (I think that's the accepted name) had a rather dumb random number generator. CRv1b had a much more targeted random number generator. CRv1a and CRv1b were very close in code though. The code for v1b was in v1a, but wasn't activated. The author had it just jump over the not-yet-wanted portions. You can spot a CRv1 attempt because it uses N's to fill up the buffer.
CRv2 on the other hand (which is technically the 3rd release, but the first two did almost the same thing) fills up the buffer using X's and then opens the backdoor, sets up root.exe in the scripts/ mapping, etc. Totally different codebase from what I gather.
In all likely hood the media is confused. It wouldn't be the first time. I figure if there's a CRv3 ever out there it won't be near as nice as v2 is. I'm thinking massive damanage upon infection to the machine... but not enough to keep the worm from spreading.
First, how does anybody know the number of Internet users is shrinking? The numbers used are all just plucked out of thin air, so all that's being done is that they're comparing one random number with another random number.
I took a peak at the IDG report. Logically, subscriptions aren't coming in at the same rate that they used to. That doesn't surprise anybody. The report also states that -usage- of the 'net is going down (I'm assuming they only look at connect times from home users). At first this surprised me, then I realized it's summer time. People aren't home as much, they're on vacation, outside, etc. I wonder if this is just a yearly thing.
You really think that the guy stole the computer, then changed the dialup settings to use a legit account? Heck no, he's using the account that the computer was already configured to use -- assuming that the password was set to saved. Contact the ISP, tell them the box is stolen, and find out the phone number that has been dialing in on -your- account. Yes, you may need to get the police involved. Checking the headers to verify that he's using your account is also a good idea though.
As was mentioned in another aticle on Slashdot the other day in the comments (forget which article it was attachd to): Let the virus writers stay uncreative.
Really... you don't want this to turn into a challenge. Let things stay this easy to write; you'll only end up infecting the people silly enough to double-click random binaries from their Outlook client.
There's no good reason that they can't implement some really creative worm that would work cross-platform and cross-client. Yes, it would be hard but you don't want a worm running out, downloading C compilers for the specific platform, compile worm, link itself, run as a background process, and go on finding hosts around it to infect. Make the bugger look for common Linux services holes, email it self to people in your inbox who run Outlook (Just look at the message headers)... infect an IIS webserver nearby, begin propogating... then unleash some unholy attack to DoS networks everywhere.
Nope... I'd rather we just left it nice and easy for them to write a trojan that's Win32 only, and requires human intervention to activate it.
Agreed... if they wanted to use a word 'Start' was not the right one. I've been using computers in some, way, shape or form, for 10 years now. When Win95 came out and I tried using it it took me a while to figure out what 'Start' was really for. I would click on a desktop icon to select it, then hit 'Start' thinking that would launch it. Took a good half an hour for me to figure out how to use and customize the menu. Very frustrating really.
Something like "Main Menu" would have been more logical, or, heck, just "Stuff".
I'm running Ximian on my desktops now, and I like the ability to break Programs, System, and Help off onto their own little menus on the pager. Takes away that extra layering of menus w/out cluttering the pager all up.
Uhm... show me an install of Win2k that -doesn't- have at least IE 4.0 on it. The specs can say just "Windows 2000" people you can't possibly have a Windows 2000 install w/out IE on it. At least, I've never seen one.
Alias a: and A: to a command that changes to/mnt/floppy (and perhaps mounts it) then changes your shell? Do the same with D: I suppose. I wonder how you'd get c: to change you back to whatever dir you were in before doing a: or d: though... and making a: and d: resume their last CWD under/mnt/whatever also. Might be fun to play with. Entirely useless -- but fun.
I think I get what the writers of the article were getting at.
Why use.NET (which lets people not worry about having the newest software installed on their system) when you can just use something like ports and keep the software on your system?
Windows users are sick of.DLL hell and having to upgrade software because of bugs and such..NET will let them keep all logic off their computer and only keep the "fluffy" presentation layer stored locally. It's a good idea.
But not very practical -- with ports (and Debian's apt) it's easy to keep everything up to date and in perfect working order without any real clue as to what's going on.
Linux is a word that has no other meaning what-so-ever outside the realm of computers. Like the original posteter said, "Illustrator" is a generic word which describes the purpose of the program. I don't see it as being any worse than StarOffice or OpenOffice vs. Microsoft Office.
We'll end up having to abandon the term 'thrashing' for something that describes the sound the new drives make. 'Breathing heavily' perhaps? Exhaling? I dunno.
When you're looking for something, use the Google search engine. (Among its other benefits, it's the most kid-friendly.) Always start your search with at least three words. Any fewer, and you're probably just wasting your time. Parents can help you learn how to pick three good words.
And when using the Google search engine if you are looking for information about the book "Little Women" you should also include the author's name with your search.
I beleive you are right on the money. A good CPU won't do diddly if you push poorly optimized code into it. IIRC Intel has (I don't think they still do) donate money to the FSF to make gcc create better code for their processors.
It might even be in Apple's best interest to do something like this -- at least donate manpower to the cause. They're free to rebuild their OS with gcc once its working well for their CPUs -- making the OS and every app run faster that they recompile. If they've already GOT a good one why don't they open that up for the gcc team to take ideas from? It's only going to help them sell more hardware, right?
Slashdot Mirror
Think about it; one can often give the impression of doing work simply by being an active presence in the office. With telecommuting, the only way to show productivity is with e-mails, phone calls and actual files sent back and forth.
:)
This is precisely why I'm trying to bring more 'Open sourceish' development practices in-house. All code gets checked into a CVS server, all announcements should be done via email mailing lists to show who's talking to clients, who's coming up with ideas, and who's writing them. By having telecommuting employees they're -forced- to function this way. No longer can a guy who sits in his chair for 10 hours a day look more important when they've only checked in 2,000 lines of code and on a few modules, when somebody who's there for far less time checks in 10,000 lines of code and completes block after block of code.
Nope...I'm -NOT- the most efficient coder at my place of work. But given the manner in which I've basically forced the past few projects to run I can prove I'm not
Quick comment on the BEFSR41 as I've dealt with them for a few people who I know that have purchased them. It's a pretty slick little product (coming from a guy who uses a full-fledged Linux box for his firewall at home) and if I didn't have the need to do filesharing and CVS with the same server I'd just have ditched it for one of these little puppies a long time ago.
However, I have noticed a little quirky bug that caused me a few hour's trouble with it once. When changing the LAN IP from something other than the default 192.168.1.1 you'll have to power-cycle or get a paperclip out and smack the little indented 'reset' button on it to get things to take effect - sometimes more than once. I'd say for 95/100 home users this isn't something they'd ever try and do but it was frustrating.
Why? Well we were trying to route a class C block of IPs through the thing to stage an ISP until the T1 could be delivered. Ended up just getting a Cisco 600 series for the task. The Linksys is still used though to provide a NAT for the office though behind the Cisco (which could do NAT too -- but that little box is just -so- easy to setup).
Original Response:
If you had read any physics books instead of letting Hollywood educate you - you would know that firing a gun in a plane a high altitude is a bad thing. Key words: Depressurization, oxygen starvation, fainting, death. What's so much better with that?
Rebuttal:
And for the "Hollywood education" comment, when's the last time you went to a shooting range with retired marines, police officers and NRA certified teachers?
Your interpretation:
Obviously your a fanatic and lost all credibility with that statement.
How in the world does making an effort to train oneself on the physical attributes and handling of weapons by people with vast experience make me a fanatic? I have no idea in the world -how- you gathered from my comment that I thought there were marined, police offices, and NRA instructors aboard that plane, nor was I insinuating that any of the above catergories have valid political views -- only that they know how guns operate and know how to use them. So, logically, if I -had- been education by Hollywood I would no longer be a "fanatic". as you put it. Did you even -read- the post or auto-respond as soon as the acronym NRA came up?
If you had read any physics books instead of letting Hollywood educate you - you would know that firing a gun in a plane a high altitude is a bad thing. Key words: Depressurization, oxygen starvation, fainting, death. What's so much better with that?
.45 230grain JHP, and full metal jacket (FMJ) for both rounds. Heck, throw in a .38 special round or two too.
Please, educate me then. Dig up the specs on a Boeing 757 and 767 and find out how many places a 9mm 115grain jacketed hollow point will go through. While you're at it run the numbers on a
And don't tell me it wouldn't happen in America,...
IIRC New Hampshire has nearly no gun control as far as carrying a weapon goes. If you can own it, you can carry it, concealed or unconcealed. By all means, dig up some statistics that show gun toting New Hampshie residents are blowing people away left and right.
And for the "Hollywood education" comment, when's the last time you went to a shooting range with retired marines, police officers and NRA certified teachers?
I agree that the position sounds a bit alarming, but really it's quite logical.
.2 seconds; that's 3 seconds per clip (you have to be -trained- to do something like that BTW, it's far more likely it would have taken him .5 seconds or more). So, that's 3 second, clip empty, getting the next one in would take another 3 seconds (at least), then empty that one out. Total operation: 9 seconds.... for what I could consider somebody well trained. An armed passenger, who is also well trained, could have likely removed his weapon from a concealed position and fired two shots into his chest within 2 seconds... stopping the bulk of the killing.
For crying out loud, the terrorists apparently took over the plane with -knives-. I'm guessing ceramic ones, so they could slip past the metal detectors. How in the world a plane full of 50-90 people were unable (or unwilling) to confront 3-5 "armed" people is beyond me. To me this is just evidence that the average American citizen is now nothing more than a fattened coward who thinks freeom and peace come without any work. That's the government's job, right?
I am getting absolutely sick of people being called crazy for having firearms and ammunition "just in case.". You may think ESR is nuts for wanting armed citizens on planes, I think everybody else is nuts for NOT wanting them. The founding fathers would probably shit a brick to find out that 90 citizens weren't able to overpower a team of 5 because none of the law abiding people had any sort of weapon on them -- even more appauled that they could pull it off with knives. I'm standing here today not under British rule (not that I think Britians are bad) because armed citizens revolted against a tyranical government.
People often spout off silly examples of one lunatic pulling out their gun and dropping a few people just because they're pissed off. Give me a freaking break. Do you -really- think somebody is going to pull out a gun for some silly-assed reason when it's encouraged for the average citizen to carry a gun? I really doubt it, unless they're criminally insane and have a death wish. Remember the shooting in a NYC subway a few years ago when some loon hopped on board with a semi-automatic handgun and rattled off 30 shots? Lets do some math here:
If memory serves he was using some type of 9mm pistol with 15 round clips. Lets say this guy really knew his stuff and could rattle off a shot every
So, allow passengers to carry? Nope, ban anything that holds more than 10 rounds. Honestly, what kind of logic is this? Granted, you can still buy guns which hold more than 10 rounds, and you can buy the clips too; but only used clips. Now what used to cost 20 dollars for a piece of metal and plastic can run you anywhere from 50-150 depending on the type of gun you're looking for.
There's outrage that gas prices were jacked up when people paniced and began filling up their tanks "just in case." At the same time, K-mart pulls it's firearms and ammunition off the shelves to look like a good guy. Good guy my ass. If somebody had turned off the gas at their gas station for fear of somebody building a bomb we'd consider the gas station owner crazy. K-mart pulls their guns and nobody seems to really give a rat's behind. The country is under attack and you intentionally keep people from buying arms and ammunition? Re-read that sentence again -- let it sink in. I will never set foot in K-mart again; and I do intend on writing a nice calm letter to their head office when this is all said and done.
Given that the nation has received the ugly end of an act of War I would consider ESR's piece right on topic, not "hardly appropriate". Yes, there was a tragedy yesterday. Yes, perhaps ESR is taking this opportunity to point of why he thinks his view is right, but I don't consider his opinion any less valid than discussion of any other anti-terrorism measures the government is thinking about taking. The rules of engagement have changed. Citizens are being treated as if they're military soldiers -- so act like it. Don't own a guy? Buy one, learn how to use it. Go grab a few hundred rounds of ammo and put them in your closet. If you can in your state, carry it wherever you feel comfortable carrying a weapon.
Ever heard of the viso-ish tool called 'Dia'? It's a GTK based application, with ports to Win32. It stores all of it's diagrams in an XML format nativly. It's not as robust as Visio, but it diagrams all my thoughts out rather nicely and I can send them over to all the other developers using Win32 platforms.
:)
Sounds like a nice system -- and a well organized team. You hiring?
I once watched a few under age drinkers in court getting sentenced for MIPs in Michigan. One kid actually said to the judge, "Well, it wasn't exactly in my -posession-." The judge then asked him where it was... "In my stomach." was the reply.
The judge wasn't amused. His reply was simply "That still counts.".
The Win9x commands are pretty close: ipconfig /renew_all
And, as another poster mentioned you can do it through 'winipcfg' the point-and-click way.
Justin Buist
Do I have any numbers for this? Nope... I'll leave that for somebody else to dig up. I'm a BugTraq reader, and I'm amazed at the sheer number of serious IIS eploits that have recently been coming out. I haven't seen anything new in the past few weeks, which is good, but take a look at the sheer number of buffer overflows alone that have been found in IIS lately. I bet it's more, or really close, to the total number of buffer overflows found in things like sendmail, bind, apache, and event telnetd in the same time span.
As a programmer I'm appauled here by IIS. Buffer overflows are old, but they keep coming back up. IIS is a new product, most likely written entirely in C++, which should be making the string handling much simpler than the C counter parts. These IIS holes are coming but due to either laziness, incompetence, or indifference in the MS coders parts. Theese aren't obscure either. You request a long URL and you overflow a buffer? 'Cmon here. The URL is coming from untrusted users -always-. Access point #1 into the system isn't even being looked at for possible holes... over and over.
One would think (read: hope) that MS has got a slew of people over-looking all areas of IIS for possible buffer overflows right now. Maybe they'll actually fix some before they're found? Doubtful... given their track record of re-active security.
Justin Buist
There were/are three versions actually. Incarnations 1 and 2 had the same purpose though. CRv1a (I think that's the accepted name) had a rather dumb random number generator. CRv1b had a much more targeted random number generator. CRv1a and CRv1b were very close in code though. The code for v1b was in v1a, but wasn't activated. The author had it just jump over the not-yet-wanted portions. You can spot a CRv1 attempt because it uses N's to fill up the buffer.
CRv2 on the other hand (which is technically the 3rd release, but the first two did almost the same thing) fills up the buffer using X's and then opens the backdoor, sets up root.exe in the scripts/ mapping, etc. Totally different codebase from what I gather.
In all likely hood the media is confused. It wouldn't be the first time. I figure if there's a CRv3 ever out there it won't be near as nice as v2 is. I'm thinking massive damanage upon infection to the machine... but not enough to keep the worm from spreading.
Justin Buist
First, how does anybody know the number of Internet users is shrinking? The numbers used are all just plucked out of thin air, so all that's being done is that they're comparing one random number with another random number.
I took a peak at the IDG report. Logically, subscriptions aren't coming in at the same rate that they used to. That doesn't surprise anybody. The report also states that -usage- of the 'net is going down (I'm assuming they only look at connect times from home users). At first this surprised me, then I realized it's summer time. People aren't home as much, they're on vacation, outside, etc. I wonder if this is just a yearly thing.
Justin Buist
You really think that the guy stole the computer, then changed the dialup settings to use a legit account? Heck no, he's using the account that the computer was already configured to use -- assuming that the password was set to saved. Contact the ISP, tell them the box is stolen, and find out the phone number that has been dialing in on -your- account. Yes, you may need to get the police involved. Checking the headers to verify that he's using your account is also a good idea though.
As was mentioned in another aticle on Slashdot the other day in the comments (forget which article it was attachd to): Let the virus writers stay uncreative.
Really... you don't want this to turn into a challenge. Let things stay this easy to write; you'll only end up infecting the people silly enough to double-click random binaries from their Outlook client.
There's no good reason that they can't implement some really creative worm that would work cross-platform and cross-client. Yes, it would be hard but you don't want a worm running out, downloading C compilers for the specific platform, compile worm, link itself, run as a background process, and go on finding hosts around it to infect. Make the bugger look for common Linux services holes, email it self to people in your inbox who run Outlook (Just look at the message headers)... infect an IIS webserver nearby, begin propogating... then unleash some unholy attack to DoS networks everywhere.
Nope... I'd rather we just left it nice and easy for them to write a trojan that's Win32 only, and requires human intervention to activate it.
Agreed... if they wanted to use a word 'Start' was not the right one. I've been using computers in some, way, shape or form, for 10 years now. When Win95 came out and I tried using it it took me a while to figure out what 'Start' was really for. I would click on a desktop icon to select it, then hit 'Start' thinking that would launch it. Took a good half an hour for me to figure out how to use and customize the menu. Very frustrating really.
Something like "Main Menu" would have been more logical, or, heck, just "Stuff".
I'm running Ximian on my desktops now, and I like the ability to break Programs, System, and Help off onto their own little menus on the pager. Takes away that extra layering of menus w/out cluttering the pager all up.
Uhm... show me an install of Win2k that -doesn't- have at least IE 4.0 on it. The specs can say just "Windows 2000" people you can't possibly have a Windows 2000 install w/out IE on it. At least, I've never seen one.
Ahhh... the joys of wireless ethernet. I can plop my laptop on top of a clothes hamper and still keep up on IRC and read my email. It's grand.
An outage of their IM service makes you wonder? 'Cmon ... they've hosed things way worse than this before.
Alias a: and A: to a command that changes to /mnt/floppy (and perhaps mounts it) then changes your shell? Do the same with D: I suppose. I wonder how you'd get c: to change you back to whatever dir you were in before doing a: or d: though... and making a: and d: resume their last CWD under /mnt/whatever also. Might be fun to play with. Entirely useless -- but fun.
I think I get what the writers of the article were getting at.
.NET (which lets people not worry about having the newest software installed on their system) when you can just use something like ports and keep the software on your system?
.DLL hell and having to upgrade software because of bugs and such. .NET will let them keep all logic off their computer and only keep the "fluffy" presentation layer stored locally. It's a good idea.
Why use
Windows users are sick of
But not very practical -- with ports (and Debian's apt) it's easy to keep everything up to date and in perfect working order without any real clue as to what's going on.
Linux is a word that has no other meaning what-so-ever outside the realm of computers. Like the original posteter said, "Illustrator" is a generic word which describes the purpose of the program. I don't see it as being any worse than StarOffice or OpenOffice vs. Microsoft Office.
We'll end up having to abandon the term 'thrashing' for something that describes the sound the new drives make. 'Breathing heavily' perhaps? Exhaling? I dunno.
- ADFS -- RiscOS
- Amiga FFS
- Apple Mac
- BFS -- Boot sector thing for SCO UnixWAre
- DOS FAT
- Fat16/32
- NTFS
- EFS -- Pre Iso9660 filesystem for CDROMS
- Ramdisks
- ISO 9660 for CD's. Plus the MS Joliet extensions
- Minix FS -- Nostalgia I suppose.
- FreeVxFS -- main FS in Sco UnixWare the docs say.
- HPFS -- OS/2's filesystem.
- QNX4FS -- for QNX Systems
- ext2 -- most common Linux filesystem
- System V filesystems, for SCoO, Xenix, and Coherent
- UDF -- for DVDs
- UFS -- for SunOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, NeXTstep.
And now we're getting ReiserFS, JFS, and XFS from SGI is on the way. Ext3 is out there too but not used all the time.So yeah, you can read Win32 formatted disks and just about everything else under the sun.
And you don't have to use Windows to use @home. There's plenty of documentation out there on this.
Don't forget 172.16.x.x. Nobody ever seems to use it -- I don't know why
When you're looking for something, use the Google search engine. (Among its other benefits, it's the most kid-friendly.) Always start your search with at least three words. Any fewer, and you're probably just wasting your time. Parents can help you learn how to pick three good words.
And when using the Google search engine if you are looking for information about the book "Little Women" you should also include the author's name with your search.
I beleive you are right on the money. A good CPU won't do diddly if you push poorly optimized code into it. IIRC Intel has (I don't think they still do) donate money to the FSF to make gcc create better code for their processors.
It might even be in Apple's best interest to do something like this -- at least donate manpower to the cause. They're free to rebuild their OS with gcc once its working well for their CPUs -- making the OS and every app run faster that they recompile. If they've already GOT a good one why don't they open that up for the gcc team to take ideas from? It's only going to help them sell more hardware, right?
Justin Buist