You don't believe you can get infected in 20 minutes? The record at the undergraduate department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta is SIX SECONDS from plugging in an installed, unprotected Windows XP system until the time it is infected.
It is highly unlikely that you could run an unprotected XP system with no firewall and no patches, hooked up via a cable modem or ADSL, for even ten minutes before getting infected.
Friend-to-friend copying of music (i.e. not p2p) is almost always done CD-audio to CD-audio. Hence, a digital copy, not an analogue copy. So yes, you get an identical copy every time. There's no degradation of music.
This is probably not always the case with movies as they are generally recompressed to fit onto a DVD-R. Still, once that initial copy is made, the rest are bit-for-bit compatible.
Similar reasoning works even for friend-to-friend copies of music when said music is converted into MP3 first. That's a lossy process but every subsequent copy is digital (including copying an MP3 CD-R). So I'm not at all sure why you think analogue is involved. Nobody I know uses cassette tapes any more, most of my friends are even moving away from CD while listening to music.
Well, this is in general a good point but it is certainly not what is going on here. It seems that a limited user account is still quite capable of downloading and running all manner of worms and spyware. That said, there _may_ be restrictions on what it can do to the registry, or some such. Doesn't seem to be affecting the spyware, though.
_Please_ let me know how to give an account which does not have permissions to do such things. I set my mother's computer up with an admin account for her and a limited user account for my little brother. I don't live at home so I can't spend as much time as is probably necessary fixing things up. So, low and behold, a few weeks later I find lots of spyware installed through my brother's account EVEN THOUGH he's still a 'limited user' and even though he cannot install software like Neverwinter Nights.
So, honest question, how should I set up my mother's computer? I'll be reformatting it shortly as a result of my misunderstanding of 'limited user'.
So clearly, 'limited user' is not the way to properly limit the users so they cannot install spyware. Obviously, an admin account isn't the way either. I don't see any other options.
$175 USD per month? Wow! I had heard that the U.S. was more expensive than Canada, I had no idea how much more expensive. We are about to move over to commercial ADSL which gives us a couple of static IPs, permission to run servers, etc. and will be paying much less than $60 Canadian (so $40 - $50 U.S. per month). We can get a similar package with cable modems, though it may be as much as $80. There are higher-end packages, of course, but even they top out around $150 per month for ADSL or cable. Of course, the $1000 - $4000 packages are available as well, but that's an entirely different category.
Thanks, Ron. I reformatted my machine last night and Mandrake 10 worked this time. I checked, binutils was definitely _not_ the problem, it was installed by default and was plenty up-to-date enough. This time through, I made sure my root wasn't on a RAID partition (I had/boot in a non-raid) and also, I erased EVERYTHING off my hard drives. And it just worked.
I obviously could not have used rpmdrake in a terminal during my prior attempts as the complete lack of any modules meant I had no net access and no CD-ROM access.
Thanks, I'll try that out. I don't know why Mandrake 10 would install (_not_ update) without installing a required tool like binutils, but I'll certainly check that out. I'd very much like to be running Mandrake 10.
I may try scrubbing my hard drive and reinstalling on a clean system. I have a suspicion that Mandrake 10 ignored my request for a clean installation/reformat.
[sigh] All I get is complaints about QM_MODULES. None of my modules install which makes my system entirely useless. This is on a supposedly clean install, though I also tried an upgrade. I tried with kernel 2.4.x and 2.6.x, no go in any case.
It's a shame. I paid $160 to Mandrake for this and it doesn't work. I was a happy Mandrake 9.2 customer but 10.0 just doesn't work.
In Canada, maintaining this information after you have lost the customer is illegal under the PIPED Act which came into effect for corporations unrelated to the government on January 1st, 2004.
Basically, you are allowed to use personal information only for the purpose you originally stated. Companies that collected this data to provide you with service are therefore legally bound to delete it once the customer cancels their account.
Good general advice, but it may be worth skipping Mandrake 10. I tried installing the full powerpack edition on my home computer and the darn thing just doesn't work. Yes, I verified by MD5sum of the burnt CDs, they all check out fine. Whenever I boot up, it is unable to load any of the modules, keeps on complaining about QM_MODULES or something. I've tried installing it inside of VMWare and it worked fine there but for the life of me, I cannot get it on my system itself.
There were a number of other annoying little issues which seem to imply to me that 10.0 was rushed out the door. I was very unsatisfied with it.
I'm curious, were you able to find a web site anywhere that clearly explains these concepts to noobs? I'm having a very similar problem with my family and I'm looking for an end result somewhat better than yours.
I assume you make sure they back up their data files and immediately reformat and reinstall everything from scratch, right? Unless you have evidence to the contrary, it is insufficient to simply remove the one worm you know about if that worm enabled unrestricted shell access to a box. Who knows who else connected to the infected machine and installed all manner of other holes, some of which your antivirus software does not pick up.
You are kidding yourself if you think an ambulance ride is only $50. My brother had to take several ambulances and he was paying hundreds of dollars per event. He took either two or three, I forget which, and was billed over $2000 here in Alberta. Unless you have a plan that covers it, ambulance rides are completely unsubsidised.
I'm not at all sure health care is free here. I currently owe several hundred dollars for Alberta Health Care. Now, granted that money doesn't actually go in to the health care system but I'm still being billed for it on a monthly basis.
And of course, we pay for ambulance rides and the like.
It almost certainly still works out cheaper than health care in the U.S., mind you.
That's funny because Microsoft much prefers plain-text or similar format when you send resumes and actively advise against you submitting a resume in Word format to them.
This is true. But note that MS Office also has a tendancy to mangle documents between versions or, and especially, when you transfer to and from the Mac version of Office. Granted, I have not yet tried this with Office for OS X but I had massive problems with earlier versions of Office for the Mac.
So, yes, OpenOffice has problems from time to time with MS Office compatibility. However, it is also true that MS Office has problems from time to time with MS Office compatibility.
Microsoft does not use it, at least not for most of their development. It is just too unstable and does not scale up well. If Microsoft refuses to eat their own dogfood, why the heck should we?
Visual Source Safe is probably better than using nothing at all. It is probably worse than any other alternative, however.
Would this allow someone to make changes on the master and allow someone else to make changes on the currently disconnected secondary, and automatically sync up when everything was connected up once again? From your description, it sounds like this feature was not supported and so this solution would not really meet the requirements outlined.
I did not write the grandparent post but it is well known on the qt-interest mailing list (run by Trolltech) that the reason there's no GPL'ed version of Qt for Windows is exactly the reason given in the grandparent post.
I find it strange that you wish Qt came with a Windows IDE. I see these as entirely separate products. I do not expect Qt to come with an IDE and indeed would probably not use one (I quite like KDevelop). Qt also does not come with a compiler, it does not come with source code control, it is not a web browser, and it cannot play DVDs. Obviously I am being facetious here.
Qt is expensive. If C++ Builder allows you to develop a similar quality of product at about the same level of work, your boss is right that you should be using C++ Builder. At the company I work for, we examined the alternatives and decided that purchasing a license for Qt would be a cost-effective solution and indeed this seems to have been the case.
If you are getting the Dell CompleteCare warranty, though, you are getting a warranty in an entirely different league than Apple's. Accidentally drop your laptop onto the floor and crack the screen? Covered. Run over it with a truck, accidentally? Covered. With Apple, you occasionally have to fight even when there are clearly manufacturing defects.
That said, I am only talking about the Dell warranty on laptops, I haven't seen the desktop warranty they use and it may well not be worth it.
IINL. Any third party who obtains a copy of the binary has the right to the source with your changes. If they did not obtain a copy of the binary, there's no way they can legally demand a copy of the source code from you because there's no legal basis for them doing so. No part of the GPL allows for this and you have no legal obligation to a third party you have hitherto had no dealings with.
I can definitely buy property anonymously. You may perhaps mean real estate instead of property, in which case I presume I could not buy real estate anonymously.
I do not think I have a right to know at least the name of a person living 2 doors next to me, though their address I can obviously obtain as I already have my address. It seems strange to me that you think I _do_ have a right to this information. Certainly, no such right is in the legal code of Canada (the owner of the house could be, and in this case is, different from the resident). Similarly I do not believe I have the right to know who else is living in my apartment building and I find it strange that you do.
That said, I am undecided as to whether I should have the right to find out names and addresses of owners of domain names. I certainly believe I should be able to find this information out under court order, I am just not sure if I should have the right without a court order.
Thanks for the feedback. I played around with growisofs some more and finally got it to work. I had been trying to output to/dev/cdrom or/dev/cdroms/cdrom0 because these both work for reading data off of that drive. However, growisofs didn't like that, came back saying the media wasn't writable (when I upgraded the package).
Eventually, I figured out that I should be outputting to/dev/dvd (aka/dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/cd) and, while I stilll have a couple of minutes until the burn is finished, things seem to be working properly now.
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You don't believe you can get infected in 20 minutes? The record at the undergraduate department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta is SIX SECONDS from plugging in an installed, unprotected Windows XP system until the time it is infected.
It is highly unlikely that you could run an unprotected XP system with no firewall and no patches, hooked up via a cable modem or ADSL, for even ten minutes before getting infected.
Strangely enough, the only people in the world who think this is an insult are Americans.
Friend-to-friend copying of music (i.e. not p2p) is almost always done CD-audio to CD-audio. Hence, a digital copy, not an analogue copy. So yes, you get an identical copy every time. There's no degradation of music.
This is probably not always the case with movies as they are generally recompressed to fit onto a DVD-R. Still, once that initial copy is made, the rest are bit-for-bit compatible.
Similar reasoning works even for friend-to-friend copies of music when said music is converted into MP3 first. That's a lossy process but every subsequent copy is digital (including copying an MP3 CD-R). So I'm not at all sure why you think analogue is involved. Nobody I know uses cassette tapes any more, most of my friends are even moving away from CD while listening to music.
Well, this is in general a good point but it is certainly not what is going on here. It seems that a limited user account is still quite capable of downloading and running all manner of worms and spyware. That said, there _may_ be restrictions on what it can do to the registry, or some such. Doesn't seem to be affecting the spyware, though.
_Please_ let me know how to give an account which does not have permissions to do such things. I set my mother's computer up with an admin account for her and a limited user account for my little brother. I don't live at home so I can't spend as much time as is probably necessary fixing things up. So, low and behold, a few weeks later I find lots of spyware installed through my brother's account EVEN THOUGH he's still a 'limited user' and even though he cannot install software like Neverwinter Nights.
So, honest question, how should I set up my mother's computer? I'll be reformatting it shortly as a result of my misunderstanding of 'limited user'.
So clearly, 'limited user' is not the way to properly limit the users so they cannot install spyware. Obviously, an admin account isn't the way either. I don't see any other options.
$175 USD per month? Wow! I had heard that the U.S. was more expensive than Canada, I had no idea how much more expensive. We are about to move over to commercial ADSL which gives us a couple of static IPs, permission to run servers, etc. and will be paying much less than $60 Canadian (so $40 - $50 U.S. per month). We can get a similar package with cable modems, though it may be as much as $80. There are higher-end packages, of course, but even they top out around $150 per month for ADSL or cable. Of course, the $1000 - $4000 packages are available as well, but that's an entirely different category.
Thanks, Ron. I reformatted my machine last night and Mandrake 10 worked this time. I checked, binutils was definitely _not_ the problem, it was installed by default and was plenty up-to-date enough. This time through, I made sure my root wasn't on a RAID partition (I had /boot in a non-raid) and also, I erased EVERYTHING off my hard drives. And it just worked.
I obviously could not have used rpmdrake in a terminal during my prior attempts as the complete lack of any modules meant I had no net access and no CD-ROM access.
Thanks, I'll try that out. I don't know why Mandrake 10 would install (_not_ update) without installing a required tool like binutils, but I'll certainly check that out. I'd very much like to be running Mandrake 10.
I may try scrubbing my hard drive and reinstalling on a clean system. I have a suspicion that Mandrake 10 ignored my request for a clean installation/reformat.
I'll post my results here when I have some.
I also run Debian. Different tools for different jobs.
[sigh] All I get is complaints about QM_MODULES. None of my modules install which makes my system entirely useless. This is on a supposedly clean install, though I also tried an upgrade. I tried with kernel 2.4.x and 2.6.x, no go in any case.
It's a shame. I paid $160 to Mandrake for this and it doesn't work. I was a happy Mandrake 9.2 customer but 10.0 just doesn't work.
In Canada, maintaining this information after you have lost the customer is illegal under the PIPED Act which came into effect for corporations unrelated to the government on January 1st, 2004.
Basically, you are allowed to use personal information only for the purpose you originally stated. Companies that collected this data to provide you with service are therefore legally bound to delete it once the customer cancels their account.
Very few companies actually do this.
Good general advice, but it may be worth skipping Mandrake 10. I tried installing the full powerpack edition on my home computer and the darn thing just doesn't work. Yes, I verified by MD5sum of the burnt CDs, they all check out fine. Whenever I boot up, it is unable to load any of the modules, keeps on complaining about QM_MODULES or something. I've tried installing it inside of VMWare and it worked fine there but for the life of me, I cannot get it on my system itself.
There were a number of other annoying little issues which seem to imply to me that 10.0 was rushed out the door. I was very unsatisfied with it.
I'm curious, were you able to find a web site anywhere that clearly explains these concepts to noobs? I'm having a very similar problem with my family and I'm looking for an end result somewhat better than yours.
I assume you make sure they back up their data files and immediately reformat and reinstall everything from scratch, right? Unless you have evidence to the contrary, it is insufficient to simply remove the one worm you know about if that worm enabled unrestricted shell access to a box. Who knows who else connected to the infected machine and installed all manner of other holes, some of which your antivirus software does not pick up.
You are kidding yourself if you think an ambulance ride is only $50. My brother had to take several ambulances and he was paying hundreds of dollars per event. He took either two or three, I forget which, and was billed over $2000 here in Alberta. Unless you have a plan that covers it, ambulance rides are completely unsubsidised.
I'm not at all sure health care is free here. I currently owe several hundred dollars for Alberta Health Care. Now, granted that money doesn't actually go in to the health care system but I'm still being billed for it on a monthly basis.
And of course, we pay for ambulance rides and the like.
It almost certainly still works out cheaper than health care in the U.S., mind you.
That's funny because Microsoft much prefers plain-text or similar format when you send resumes and actively advise against you submitting a resume in Word format to them.
This is true. But note that MS Office also has a tendancy to mangle documents between versions or, and especially, when you transfer to and from the Mac version of Office. Granted, I have not yet tried this with Office for OS X but I had massive problems with earlier versions of Office for the Mac.
So, yes, OpenOffice has problems from time to time with MS Office compatibility. However, it is also true that MS Office has problems from time to time with MS Office compatibility.
Microsoft does not use it, at least not for most of their development. It is just too unstable and does not scale up well. If Microsoft refuses to eat their own dogfood, why the heck should we?
Visual Source Safe is probably better than using nothing at all. It is probably worse than any other alternative, however.
Would this allow someone to make changes on the master and allow someone else to make changes on the currently disconnected secondary, and automatically sync up when everything was connected up once again? From your description, it sounds like this feature was not supported and so this solution would not really meet the requirements outlined.
I did not write the grandparent post but it is well known on the qt-interest mailing list (run by Trolltech) that the reason there's no GPL'ed version of Qt for Windows is exactly the reason given in the grandparent post.
I find it strange that you wish Qt came with a Windows IDE. I see these as entirely separate products. I do not expect Qt to come with an IDE and indeed would probably not use one (I quite like KDevelop). Qt also does not come with a compiler, it does not come with source code control, it is not a web browser, and it cannot play DVDs. Obviously I am being facetious here.
Qt is expensive. If C++ Builder allows you to develop a similar quality of product at about the same level of work, your boss is right that you should be using C++ Builder. At the company I work for, we examined the alternatives and decided that purchasing a license for Qt would be a cost-effective solution and indeed this seems to have been the case.
If you are getting the Dell CompleteCare warranty, though, you are getting a warranty in an entirely different league than Apple's. Accidentally drop your laptop onto the floor and crack the screen? Covered. Run over it with a truck, accidentally? Covered. With Apple, you occasionally have to fight even when there are clearly manufacturing defects.
That said, I am only talking about the Dell warranty on laptops, I haven't seen the desktop warranty they use and it may well not be worth it.
IINL. Any third party who obtains a copy of the binary has the right to the source with your changes. If they did not obtain a copy of the binary, there's no way they can legally demand a copy of the source code from you because there's no legal basis for them doing so. No part of the GPL allows for this and you have no legal obligation to a third party you have hitherto had no dealings with.
I can definitely buy property anonymously. You may perhaps mean real estate instead of property, in which case I presume I could not buy real estate anonymously.
I do not think I have a right to know at least the name of a person living 2 doors next to me, though their address I can obviously obtain as I already have my address. It seems strange to me that you think I _do_ have a right to this information. Certainly, no such right is in the legal code of Canada (the owner of the house could be, and in this case is, different from the resident). Similarly I do not believe I have the right to know who else is living in my apartment building and I find it strange that you do.
That said, I am undecided as to whether I should have the right to find out names and addresses of owners of domain names. I certainly believe I should be able to find this information out under court order, I am just not sure if I should have the right without a court order.
Thanks for the feedback. I played around with growisofs some more and finally got it to work. I had been trying to output to /dev/cdrom or /dev/cdroms/cdrom0 because these both work for reading data off of that drive. However, growisofs didn't like that, came back saying the media wasn't writable (when I upgraded the package).
/dev/dvd (aka /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/cd) and, while I stilll have a couple of minutes until the burn is finished, things seem to be working properly now.
Eventually, I figured out that I should be outputting to
Thanks for everyone's help.