Make your base image with firefox installed and configured the way you want it.
If the users login with a generic login, like "computerlab" then all you have to do is make note of the location of their profile directory. Set the files in there writable only by system and administrators after you configure firefox the way you want. If you need to make any changes after that, use a GPO and have windows run a bat file on startup(when it will run as system) that replaces any changed files in the profile. Deny users the ability to create new files in c:\documents and settings\%username%\application data\mozilla\firefox\profiles. This is the easy scenario.
If your people are logging in with their own idea, then you have to work around Firefox/Mozilla's assinine profile directory naming convention, arguably the stupidest thing they've done. Everything as before, except your script that runs on computer start up has to loop through all of folders in c:\documents and settings and then find out what Firefox decided to name the default profile. *Then* you can copy your files.
IMO, the profile naming convention and the refusal to use registry settings under windows are the two biggest mistakes made by the Firefox team. Because I can't write a custom adm file to make a GPO to control firefox in a lab, I can't role it out. It takes too much of my time to configure and then work around the problems with the software. With IE, I just set a GPO and suddenly no one can run activeX components. No one can override the popup blocker, no one can set the home page or change the backgrounds.
Firefox may be more secure out of the box, but the inability to easily manage it in lab settings makes it less secure there.
I believe its something to do with the timing of the advert iFrames, but I could be completely wrong.
That must be why I've never seen it. Unless the big slashdot/firefox bug is the little bit of text overlap that occasionally shows up on the left hand menu.
I am using AdBlock to block http://ads.osdn.com/* so that would also block any iframes that might be screwing up the display even worse.
Is this motivation for people to find the bugs, i.e., there's some programmer out there thinking, "Hmm, if I do this and this, then Gnome will run three times as fast. Oh well, I'm a KDE supporter so I don't care." Or is this a way to reward all of those people who do care about Gnome and are working on it by giving them a specific area to concentrate on and then rewarding them for their hard work, in other words some programmer thinking, "Hmm, I've got some free time and I can either work on fixing eyecandy or fixing memory leaks. Guess I'll fix the memory leaks first and get a reward."
Everyone has been assuming that this is pure motivation, appealing to the greedy nature of people who aren't already contributing. I don't think that's the case. Generally speaking, those people who are good programmers and know the code well enough to actually identify and fix problem areas are probably already doing so. This "bounty" seems to be more a way of rewarding them and helping to give them a list of priorities.
Most web cartoonist seem to think that Tuesday's comic should be started and finished on Monday. The key is to get a month or two of strips completely finished, *then* start publishing. You'll also get a good idea of exactly how many strips you can do per week if you get some done first. If you can't do more than 3 a week during that two month build up period, don't even attempt to do a daily strip.
Since Wine does not require an installation of windows, MS is under no obligation to provide OS updates or add-ons to wine users.
HOWEVER, I think the are required to provide updates to non-OS applications. Is MS provides an update to Word, they should be obligated to provide that service pack or hotfix to all legally licensed users of Word, regardless of the OS on which they are running Word. I bought a copy of Word, and how, when, and where I run it should not matter one whit.
This just seems like an extension (pardon the word) of the linkification extension for Firefox. linkification makes non-linked urls and email addresses clickable. And I like the extension.
The google tool just seems to be a bit more intelligent (and maybe pushy, but we'll see) about the sorts of things it makes into links.
There's also a vast difference between MS linking back to its products and google linking a ups tracking number to the ups site. The latter does something that's actually useful. The former tries to make you use all MS all the time. That's a big difference.
Others have already pointed out the MS "It's now a feature you can't turn off" and Google "Here's the tool if you want to download it" attitudes.
he completely ignores when you can order your computer piece by piece and put it together not only cheaper for the hardware but there's no price fixing with windows included.
Assuming it's true that you can do that, businesses would be stupid to do that. (The last time I checked it wasn't, simply because big manufacturers like Dell, HP, Gateway, IBM, etc., get such a big discount on bulk hardware orders that it is cheaper for them to buy the parts than it it for you.)
Do you know how much time and effort it would take for techs to research, purchase, and build 100 computers compared to phoning their Dell rep and saying "Give me 100 of model A?" Not to mention the fact that most business computers come with 4 or even 5 year warranties for the whole box. You deal with one entity for all hardware problems this way. Your way has a different hardware vendor for each part with different warranty rules.
It can take 2 hours to build and test a computer. Even if the price for the parts was the same as the price for a pre-made computer, you've just added $100 in tech time to the cost. Now multiply that by 20, 50, 100 or 1000 computers and you see why companies simply do not build from scratch for their standard desktop except in very rare and very specific circumstances.
Purchasing a distro gives you support options that you simply don't get with the free download. Remember when Linux companies were saying they'd make money selling support?;)
No, businesses with more than about 20 computers are going to want standardization, one point of contact for hardware and one point of contact for software.
XP plain has a firewall. It was just configured differently and you couldn't manage it via gpo in the enterprise.
SP2 turned the firewall on by default. It was off by default in the initial release.
Re:What could firefox hacks possibly cover?
on
Firefox In Print
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· Score: 2, Informative
There are some cool things you can do by extracting the files from browser.jar, editing the xul commands in the individual files, then recompressing them into browser.jar.
Do a search for firefox kiosk browser.jar and see some of the customizations.
I would also hope that there'd be some good chapters on extension writing.
There were 3 things I didn't notice in the htmlarea preview. I've worked with spaw more, so I'm more familiar with it and may have missed these in htmlarea.
1) Image preview. Spaw let's you go into the config file and say that your images are in/images. Then when you click on the image button, it shows a list of images in that directory and when you click on an image, you get a preview. You can have multiple image libraries and name them, like you see in clip art collections, with each library a different directory on the server. Htmlarea requires you to put in a url. Not a big difference, but it's a nice feature and well done.
2) CSS styles on a menu. Spaw let's you import an external style sheet(s) and then you can tell it what styles from the style sheets to present on a drop down style list to the user. You may have some styles that users shouldn't access, so only the styles you add to the config file are present in the drop down. Not a big deal unless you've got a lot of styles and your site makes extensive use of them.
3) Spaw has some better table controls. Once you insert a table, you get controls to add and delete rows and columns and split(horizontally or vertically) and join cells. Again, if you aren't using tables it isn't a big deal, but it looks and works nicely.
Htmlarea seemed a lot faster to load compared to the other alternatives people suggested and it was more feature rich. It looks like a really nice program.
Thanks for the pointer to FCKeditor. I'll have to look at it more closely to see if it's worth replacing what is currently working for us. So far the only difference that stood out was that you don't get image previews as you browse. Otherwise it is very similar to the Spaw software in look and feel and functionality.
I really like the style, heading, font, and size previews.
I noticed that too when I tried it yesterday. It was only the first edit area that was broken. The other edit areas worked fine. I suspect it's because they're using the beta version for firefox.
I don't know who put the bee under your saddle. The topic was foss replacements to dreamweaver and spaw fits the requirements. I followed your links and tried the twiki sandbox demo again. Here are the features it's still missing (at least on the twiki sandbox, and I hope they'd want to show off the most advanced festures):
-- users were required to enter formatting as special codes, like astetisks for *bold*.
-- no wysiwig editi. This was a big feature that was missing. In spaw, you click a button to insert a picture, then just drag it into the exact position with your mouse.
-- a standard editing toobar, like the kind you see in every word processor, with buttons for bold, italic, text justification, tables, image insertion and more.
Those were the big features that were missing from their demos. Got links to examples of demos? The wysiwig is the main requirement.
I know wikis are all cool right now, but they aren't the solution to every problem. They may be your hammer, but they don't fit my nail.;) Spaw is gpl'ed so even Stallman would approve of it. So I'm not sure why you had to come off as so hostile. Just the slashdot effect I guess.;)
darn hunt and peck pda. Makes my typing worse than normal.
-- None of the wicki interfaces I've seen present different css styles to users.
-- None of the wicki interfaces I've seen present the range of html code that spaw provides. Most of the wicki or boards just rely on bbcode, which has to then be converted to real html code and also limits you to a very small subset of what you can do.
-- None of the wicki interfaces I've seen let experts enter any and all html code, php, javascript, perl, etc., that the user might need to when designing the web page.
-- None of the wicki interfaces I've seen handle table and table formatting at all.
-- None of the wicki interfaces I've seen handle styles. You do know what css is, right?
If you think network mounting the web space (and what the heck is that? I'll assume you mean mounting/var/www/htdocs as a local drive letter or similar, but please do attempt to explain) is anything like using templating software, you're pretty clueless.
Do you understand what templates are in real web page design or are you just stupid?
Yes, I know, IE, but remember that's what most people use. They're working on a gecko version currently, but it's still in beta. The current version works fine in firefox now except that you don't get wysiwyg editing, just html.
The way it works is this:
We have a web page layout designed by a graphic artist. The content part of the page is stored in a database. The user logs into to the system and as the user surfs the site, any web page that the user can edit has a button at the bottom saying "edit this page". Permissions are done through a mysql database. Spaw doesn't care how you do security, they just provide the editor. When the user presses edit, the page is reloaded, but this time the content is loaded in the spaw editor embedded in the browser. User edits page, presses button to publish and the data is pumped back into the database and published instantly.
I *really* like this system. I can customize the menus and create my own styles for the style menu. I put the official company colors as a style on an external style sheet and then add it to the menu. People that want to hightlight text can then use the official company colors. If the colors change, I just edit one style sheet.
It really has worked well for us. No more licensing or software install hassles. Need to work from home? If you've got IE 5.5 or higher, and soon the gecko engine, you're set.
While it isn't quite the same as Dreamweaver templates, the result is similar. Users can only edit the parts of the page that we give them permission to edit. We don't have to worry about a user deciding not to go with the approved layout and template.
I really can't say enough good things about the SPAW product.
I'd be very surpised if it was infected. It was installed from an oracle supplied cd. Spybot didn't think anything was infected, not did my anti-virus.
I tested a test lab computer at work. No special attempt to infect it, just running a lot of test freeware and average junk.
The MS product found 3 problems: tightvnc, iMesh infecting every file in my Oracle client directory !!!, and a third one I can't remember. Spybot on the same computer found about 10 things, all different.
So in my little test, MS did pretty poorly. I'm sure that every file in the c:\orahome directory was not infected with adware. And it missed quite a bit that spybot found.
The best that can be said for the Giant/MS product is that it tells you if it finds vnc installed. If it tells you when it finds servU or other ftp products, it will be a useful tool, but I'll stick with Spybot too.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know what's sadder: that I forgot what the real link is or that I care that I forgot. ;)
Both firefox and ie come with msi files for deployment via gpo.
Here's what you have to do:
Make your base image with firefox installed and configured the way you want it.
If the users login with a generic login, like "computerlab" then all you have to do is make note of the location of their profile directory. Set the files in there writable only by system and administrators after you configure firefox the way you want. If you need to make any changes after that, use a GPO and have windows run a bat file on startup(when it will run as system) that replaces any changed files in the profile. Deny users the ability to create new files in c:\documents and settings\%username%\application data\mozilla\firefox\profiles. This is the easy scenario.
If your people are logging in with their own idea, then you have to work around Firefox/Mozilla's assinine profile directory naming convention, arguably the stupidest thing they've done. Everything as before, except your script that runs on computer start up has to loop through all of folders in c:\documents and settings and then find out what Firefox decided to name the default profile. *Then* you can copy your files.
IMO, the profile naming convention and the refusal to use registry settings under windows are the two biggest mistakes made by the Firefox team. Because I can't write a custom adm file to make a GPO to control firefox in a lab, I can't role it out. It takes too much of my time to configure and then work around the problems with the software. With IE, I just set a GPO and suddenly no one can run activeX components. No one can override the popup blocker, no one can set the home page or change the backgrounds.
Firefox may be more secure out of the box, but the inability to easily manage it in lab settings makes it less secure there.
Wow, so if a user decides that all the lab computers should have goatse.com as the homepage, you're ok with being fired for letting it happen?
Three. Ever since I got out of junior high anyway. If you'd have asked me many, many, many years ago the answer would have been different. ;)
I believe its something to do with the timing of the advert iFrames, but I could be completely wrong.
That must be why I've never seen it. Unless the big slashdot/firefox bug is the little bit of text overlap that occasionally shows up on the left hand menu.
I am using AdBlock to block http://ads.osdn.com/* so that would also block any iframes that might be screwing up the display even worse.
I'll third it. Does that mean the motion passes?
Is this motivation for people to find the bugs, i.e., there's some programmer out there thinking, "Hmm, if I do this and this, then Gnome will run three times as fast. Oh well, I'm a KDE supporter so I don't care." Or is this a way to reward all of those people who do care about Gnome and are working on it by giving them a specific area to concentrate on and then rewarding them for their hard work, in other words some programmer thinking, "Hmm, I've got some free time and I can either work on fixing eyecandy or fixing memory leaks. Guess I'll fix the memory leaks first and get a reward."
Everyone has been assuming that this is pure motivation, appealing to the greedy nature of people who aren't already contributing. I don't think that's the case. Generally speaking, those people who are good programmers and know the code well enough to actually identify and fix problem areas are probably already doing so. This "bounty" seems to be more a way of rewarding them and helping to give them a list of priorities.
Kevin and Kell and Bill Holbrook would win. One a day, every day since 1995, plus he's doing 2 other strips in print, "On the Fasttrack" and "Safe Havens" (IIRC). I'm sure he's doing something few other web cartoonists do: work ahead.
Most web cartoonist seem to think that Tuesday's comic should be started and finished on Monday. The key is to get a month or two of strips completely finished, *then* start publishing. You'll also get a good idea of exactly how many strips you can do per week if you get some done first. If you can't do more than 3 a week during that two month build up period, don't even attempt to do a daily strip.
Since Wine does not require an installation of windows, MS is under no obligation to provide OS updates or add-ons to wine users.
HOWEVER, I think the are required to provide updates to non-OS applications. Is MS provides an update to Word, they should be obligated to provide that service pack or hotfix to all legally licensed users of Word, regardless of the OS on which they are running Word. I bought a copy of Word, and how, when, and where I run it should not matter one whit.
This just seems like an extension (pardon the word) of the linkification extension for Firefox. linkification makes non-linked urls and email addresses clickable. And I like the extension.
The google tool just seems to be a bit more intelligent (and maybe pushy, but we'll see) about the sorts of things it makes into links.
There's also a vast difference between MS linking back to its products and google linking a ups tracking number to the ups site. The latter does something that's actually useful. The former tries to make you use all MS all the time. That's a big difference.
Others have already pointed out the MS "It's now a feature you can't turn off" and Google "Here's the tool if you want to download it" attitudes.
Heh, G'Kar was able to remove his eyeball and use it as a spy cam to watch what others were doing.
We don't have to, but maybe we should.
Wow, I really appreciate the Borland/Delphi/Kylix/C++ Builder/JBuilder IDE now. Even the VB ide was easier to build a gui app in.
he completely ignores when you can order your computer piece by piece and put it together not only cheaper for the hardware but there's no price fixing with windows included.
;)
Assuming it's true that you can do that, businesses would be stupid to do that. (The last time I checked it wasn't, simply because big manufacturers like Dell, HP, Gateway, IBM, etc., get such a big discount on bulk hardware orders that it is cheaper for them to buy the parts than it it for you.)
Do you know how much time and effort it would take for techs to research, purchase, and build 100 computers compared to phoning their Dell rep and saying "Give me 100 of model A?" Not to mention the fact that most business computers come with 4 or even 5 year warranties for the whole box. You deal with one entity for all hardware problems this way. Your way has a different hardware vendor for each part with different warranty rules.
It can take 2 hours to build and test a computer. Even if the price for the parts was the same as the price for a pre-made computer, you've just added $100 in tech time to the cost. Now multiply that by 20, 50, 100 or 1000 computers and you see why companies simply do not build from scratch for their standard desktop except in very rare and very specific circumstances.
Purchasing a distro gives you support options that you simply don't get with the free download. Remember when Linux companies were saying they'd make money selling support?
No, businesses with more than about 20 computers are going to want standardization, one point of contact for hardware and one point of contact for software.
XP plain has a firewall. It was just configured differently and you couldn't manage it via gpo in the enterprise.
SP2 turned the firewall on by default. It was off by default in the initial release.
There are some cool things you can do by extracting the files from browser.jar, editing the xul commands in the individual files, then recompressing them into browser.jar.
Do a search for firefox kiosk browser.jar and see some of the customizations.
I would also hope that there'd be some good chapters on extension writing.
There were 3 things I didn't notice in the htmlarea preview. I've worked with spaw more, so I'm more familiar with it and may have missed these in htmlarea.
/images. Then when you click on the image button, it shows a list of images in that directory and when you click on an image, you get a preview. You can have multiple image libraries and name them, like you see in clip art collections, with each library a different directory on the server. Htmlarea requires you to put in a url. Not a big difference, but it's a nice feature and well done.
1) Image preview. Spaw let's you go into the config file and say that your images are in
2) CSS styles on a menu. Spaw let's you import an external style sheet(s) and then you can tell it what styles from the style sheets to present on a drop down style list to the user. You may have some styles that users shouldn't access, so only the styles you add to the config file are present in the drop down. Not a big deal unless you've got a lot of styles and your site makes extensive use of them.
3) Spaw has some better table controls. Once you insert a table, you get controls to add and delete rows and columns and split(horizontally or vertically) and join cells. Again, if you aren't using tables it isn't a big deal, but it looks and works nicely.
Htmlarea seemed a lot faster to load compared to the other alternatives people suggested and it was more feature rich. It looks like a really nice program.
Thanks for the pointer to FCKeditor. I'll have to look at it more closely to see if it's worth replacing what is currently working for us. So far the only difference that stood out was that you don't get image previews as you browse. Otherwise it is very similar to the Spaw software in look and feel and functionality.
I really like the style, heading, font, and size previews.
I noticed that too when I tried it yesterday. It was only the first edit area that was broken. The other edit areas worked fine. I suspect it's because they're using the beta version for firefox.
I don't know who put the bee under your saddle. The topic was foss replacements to dreamweaver and spaw fits the requirements. I followed your links and tried the twiki sandbox demo again. Here are the features it's still missing (at least on the twiki sandbox, and I hope they'd want to show off the most advanced festures):
;) Spaw is gpl'ed so even Stallman would approve of it. So I'm not sure why you had to come off as so hostile. Just the slashdot effect I guess. ;)
-- users were required to enter formatting as special codes, like astetisks for *bold*.
-- no wysiwig editi. This was a big feature that was missing. In spaw, you click a button to insert a picture, then just drag it into the exact position with your mouse.
-- a standard editing toobar, like the kind you see in every word processor, with buttons for bold, italic, text justification, tables, image insertion and more.
Those were the big features that were missing from their demos. Got links to examples of demos? The wysiwig is the main requirement.
I know wikis are all cool right now, but they aren't the solution to every problem. They may be your hammer, but they don't fit my nail.
darn hunt and peck pda. Makes my typing worse than normal.
No, I don't work for them.
/var/www/htdocs as a local drive letter or similar, but please do attempt to explain) is anything like using templating software, you're pretty clueless.
-- None of the wicki interfaces I've seen present different css styles to users.
-- None of the wicki interfaces I've seen present the range of html code that spaw provides. Most of the wicki or boards just rely on bbcode, which has to then be converted to real html code and also limits you to a very small subset of what you can do.
-- None of the wicki interfaces I've seen let experts enter any and all html code, php, javascript, perl, etc., that the user might need to when designing the web page.
-- None of the wicki interfaces I've seen handle table and table formatting at all.
-- None of the wicki interfaces I've seen handle styles. You do know what css is, right?
If you think network mounting the web space (and what the heck is that? I'll assume you mean mounting
Do you understand what templates are in real web page design or are you just stupid?
I've moved most of our site over to a database backend with users able to edit the page from within IE using the SPAW web editor from Solmetra. http://www.solmetra.com/en/disp.php/en_products/en _spaw/en_spaw_about.
Yes, I know, IE, but remember that's what most people use. They're working on a gecko version currently, but it's still in beta. The current version works fine in firefox now except that you don't get wysiwyg editing, just html.
The way it works is this:
We have a web page layout designed by a graphic artist. The content part of the page is stored in a database. The user logs into to the system and as the user surfs the site, any web page that the user can edit has a button at the bottom saying "edit this page". Permissions are done through a mysql database. Spaw doesn't care how you do security, they just provide the editor. When the user presses edit, the page is reloaded, but this time the content is loaded in the spaw editor embedded in the browser. User edits page, presses button to publish and the data is pumped back into the database and published instantly.
I *really* like this system. I can customize the menus and create my own styles for the style menu. I put the official company colors as a style on an external style sheet and then add it to the menu. People that want to hightlight text can then use the official company colors. If the colors change, I just edit one style sheet.
It really has worked well for us. No more licensing or software install hassles. Need to work from home? If you've got IE 5.5 or higher, and soon the gecko engine, you're set.
While it isn't quite the same as Dreamweaver templates, the result is similar. Users can only edit the parts of the page that we give them permission to edit. We don't have to worry about a user deciding not to go with the approved layout and template.
I really can't say enough good things about the SPAW product.
I'd be very surpised if it was infected. It was installed from an oracle supplied cd. Spybot didn't think anything was infected, not did my anti-virus.
I tested a test lab computer at work. No special attempt to infect it, just running a lot of test freeware and average junk.
The MS product found 3 problems: tightvnc, iMesh infecting every file in my Oracle client directory !!!, and a third one I can't remember. Spybot on the same computer found about 10 things, all different.
So in my little test, MS did pretty poorly. I'm sure that every file in the c:\orahome directory was not infected with adware. And it missed quite a bit that spybot found.
The best that can be said for the Giant/MS product is that it tells you if it finds vnc installed. If it tells you when it finds servU or other ftp products, it will be a useful tool, but I'll stick with Spybot too.