I've got to say - I rather like iTunes. It works quite well for my basic needs, and it almost feels like its randomization has AI, as it comes up with some amazing mixes. I find it extremely easy to use, and sometimes, that's not a bad thing. When I go home, I use a system I cobbled together to play my music (a mix of Perl, Apache (or thttpd), mpg321/ogg123, and general Linux fun), and I quite like that method too, but when I've got to use my Windows box at work, I find it to be a simple smooth way to go.
The *only* serious deficiency is the inability to properly play Oggs [Ogg Vorbis files, for the pedantic] (Ogg streams, in particular - so I can play via an SSH tunnel to home). If Apple adds this in, I will be extremely happy!
Holy sh*t! Uhh...that still works in IE6SP1 on my XP machine at work. I updated this machine just half an hour ago, with the last 4 updates, and it still appears. The box is misaligned, though, because I don't use the gumdrop gooey crap, so my address bar is a couple of pixels higher up. A smart JS vulnerability would probably calculate all the pertinent details about browser location (I believe you can access the top left pixel location of the browser window as well as the top left pixel location of the 'canvas,' and you could probably do the math based on that (assuming the user didn't move the address bar)). I don't screw around with JS in that manner, but I've got Javascript: The Definitive Guide, for when I have to mess around with a poorly written webmail page.
I'm rather glad I don't use IE:).
Re:One of the best things Google/GMail could do
on
Gmail Spam Filter Testing
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Indeed - while I was doing a lot of spam fighting at work, I reviewed a honeypot I'd set up, and was amazed. I used mutt to review the messages, and found a couple of messages where the text part was a page or two from "The Wizard of Oz" and the nasty offer for some kind of auto insurance or other crap was in the HTML section, replete with hidden hash busters behind color backgrounds. These guys are sharp - they must be paying some smart programmers a lot of money, and it's only sad that they've sunk to such levels.
Re:for actually using a computer (writing document
on
Is Caps Lock Dead?
·
· Score: 1
A very good question, I'd have to say (don't forget quotes, exclamation points, or curly braces, for that matter). I suppose she must have resorted to using the shift key then. Which begs the question, "Why for the love of [something], didn't she use the shift key 'normally?'"
I don't know, nor do I care. She's gone!!!!
(I'm sorry, after having her singing parts of "Eminem" songs in lab, I got pretty pissed off with her.)
Re:No! I use CapsLock as my "ESC" key
on
Is Caps Lock Dead?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I did the same thing after I got fed up with the key, and found a nice utility to remap it on my Windows machine at work - life's so much easier that way.
Re:for actually using a computer (writing document
on
Is Caps Lock Dead?
·
· Score: 1
I had one programming student (in Java) who did this, and it absolutely infuriated me - how could anyone be that stupid? I really doubt that she had a disability that kept her from holding down the shift key whilst pressing the letter to be capitalized. Then again, that girl was a real piece of work. So in addition to getting a lot of grief from her, I'd have deal with her slow typing when we get to things like:
StringBuffer myBuffer=new StringBuffer();/* ARGH!!! */
I'll take that one a bit further:
Here's a post of mine, citing how that article (in *August*) was yet another dupe. All said and done, I do intend to build one such system for myself, and have been building up an array of dead hard drives at work:).
No, not true. What the parent poster was saying is that to cause a serious effect on your system, you will get an authentication dialog box that requires you to enter the admin password. Even if you have this password, it will make you think twice, or at least put some accountability on you. In Windows, if you log in as Administrator (as most home computers ship), the malware will install with no security prompting whatsoever, as your logon credentials are enough for Windows.
This is absolutely true. Palm Desktop is a royal pain. It is alledgedly Win2k/WinXP compatible, but that is in word more than in spirit (I guess compatible means that it runs at all). If you can find your way around the Palm website, you'll find a dark, little secret - for Palm Desktop to be used by multiple Windows users, you must install a separate copy of the software for each user. Normally, I only have one user to support, so trial and error has produced the following procedure:
Log in as an admin.
Add the user to the Administrator's group
Log in as the user
Install the stupid piece of 'multi-user' software known as Palm Deskop under the user's login
Log out
As admin, revoke those Admin privileges - I'll be damned if they're going to have admin privileges
What this does is to install the files in Progra~1 with the user's SID assigned as Creator, giving them the required rights in the future. Otherwise, if you install it as a regular admin user, when you log on as the end user, it sh*ts itself, having no ability to write the files into the folder. The files *should* be written out to the ~/App Data folder, but that would be a proper implementation - why should they be bothered to do that? Oh, and if you're not lucky, this still won't work, and you'll have to grant Full Control to that folder to the end user.
No *nix program would be this stupid. There is a clear differentiation between app binaries, libraries, global config files -and- user data & config files. It is obvious in Win2k that M$ tried to copy this model, particularly with the more obvious "Documents & Settings" 'folder' that is an overly wordy equivalent to/home (Why do they make the things so long? Administrator is an evil word to use when you could use 'root'). Unfortunately, many of the programmers who write Windows apps don't pay any attention to proper techniques, and just write code like they've done since DOS days.
I wish I didn't have to support M$ Windows:-/.
I just filled in my grad school application on a typewriter - I've got an old Smith-Corona *electric* typewriter in my attic. It works fine, and got the job done quickly. Sure, I could have scanned the thing in, probably set it as a backdrop in a Scribus document, and filled the stuff in, but I don't mind the thing. The only annoying thing would be the lack of a backspace key, which is why one must be even more vigilant about not making typos. The real irony of the application process was that the application itself was PDF, but it wasn't a fill-in form. Perhaps I could have imported it into a piece of software (and I may have a copy of Adobe Acrobat in the software cabinet @ work somewhere that I could have set up for that case), but it just didn't feel like it was worth the effort. I also find some enjoyment in the use of old, functional technology.
Damn...that bug has haunted and infuriated me many times before - I hadn't gone so far as to look in Bugzilla, though. Alas, there's only so many things I can take the time to do. I don't know when the last time is that I got that bug, or for that matter, if this is supposed to affect both Mozilla (App. Suite) *and* MozFirebird, or just the former. I use the latter, and this used to get me all the time, but maybe I'm just being more careful about what I do, and not getting it by chance. These days I just have to deal with it spontaneously locking up, most commonly after if freaks out on a drag-and-drop that I wasn't even trying to do. I either have to let it crash and burn, as it locks all kbd & mouse activity in X11, or go to tty1, and just do a `!killall`.
Yeah, I've noticed this pattern as well - and I've just been studying a mess of spam today to try and train a crappy spam filter. In my dept., we're speculating that some of this meaningless crap spam is actually an attack of some sort, designed to slow down e-mail systems, and/or crush them (think really small offices). There cannot be any real purpose to some of the spam out there - you would have to be brain dead to respond to some of the absolutely crappy messages that are being sent. It is entirely possible that some of these pointless spams might actually serve one other purpose - validating e-mail addresses through IMG message-tracking tags. (As such, I've been very carefully examining e-mails inside my favorite MUA - mutt:-).)
When I visited SF, I found the Golden Gate Perk to be a very nice Internet cafe. They offered free wireless, with a revolving key handed out with your receipt. Alas, on my really old Win95 laptop, which I just lug about as portable TTY (I pretty much run PuTTY full screen on it exclusively), refused to configure itself correctly, so I paid a small amount of money to use their workstations, and the owner allowed my to hook up my computer to the wired network, in lieu of the computer I would otherwise pay to use. From a security point of view, I much preferred this scenario, as everything went encrypted between my laptop and my server, with no risk of keystroke loggers. Furthermore, due to some glitch, the PCs there just refused to address a server of mine, the IP address and/or DNS was just being flat out denied, so the laptop was the best solution (it would have been great if the wireless would have worked:-/) - and besides, who doesn't love links?
There's a surprisingly good reason for that one - try enabling Num Lock on a laptop*. There's a key you can set in the registry to enable Num Lock, but it only comes on after you log on, so that you won't be messing up your password with numbers by mistake.
*Given the default hardware profile that laptops present these days, it's awfully hard (particularly for Windows' 'high quality' hardware detection) to tell if a keyboard is a real one, or a laptop.
Drat, looks like I'm going to have to set up an alias. I'm rather accustomed to typing !ph from bash these days (calls up `phoenix &`). I second prior comments about telling people I know about the aforementioned browser. I have raved about how great Phoenix is, and now if I mention Firebird, I'll have to find some way to make it clear that it's the same thing. I bet my boss it going to have some comment to make about this - he likes to make fun of the names of a bunch of Linux programs (though kind of unjustified at times - he thinks they sound silly).
Java is not purely an interpreted language - it goes through a first level of compilation to 'byte code,' which is executed by the Java Virtual Machine, running on any of the supported platforms. You can distribute Java programs without the source code, as.class or.jar files.
from the reposting-four-month-old-stories dept.
Hmmm, I rather liked this mod, after having read it here. I even mentioned it about a month ago in some thread about DJ's and hard drives, having recalled reading it here. To find the link to this wondrous dupe, I simply pressed ALT-F2 from KDE, typed `gg:hard drive speakers site:slashdot.org`, and the very first hit was the article.
Lest we forget about Afrotech's Hard-disk Sound System mentioned on/. a couple of months back. I've now got a couple of dead hard drives from work, so maybe this will be a good project to try.
I was quite glad to see this feature put in there. Countless times I have gone to people's offices, and asked them "Did you really want to have your toolbars/menu bars arranged like that?" 95% of the time, they didn't - but didn't know how they did it, or how to fix it. While I like the "Quick Launch" bar in Windows, and like to be able to change the length of it, I invariably find people muck it up, taking up nearly all of the taskbar, and don't know how to change it back. XP also has a "Lock Toolbars" feature, to prevent this. There are a few rare cases where people really do want a tiny area for their running applications (they probably want to hide the titles), but I consider it a waste of space.
Disclaimer: I am a KDE user, I deal with this Windows stuff at work. I would not recommend XP to anyone, but have tried it in the interest of preparing screenshots for network configuration instructions.
I am glad to see that KDE now has a "Quick Launcher" applet for Kicker, so I am not wasting valuable screen space on application icons. I hate the fact that RedHat ships with icons for nearly all the KOffice apps down there (a KDE default, IIRC), and more, cluttering Kicker tremendously - Mandrake has less unncessary icons included (they support KDE). Since I'm currently using 1024x768, there is precious little space for running apps if Kicker is not setup neatly. I have finally tweaked it to be relatively efficient, though the fuzzy clock makes the running apps section smaller at times, but I just love my fuzzy clock.
I would love a Tablet PC for surfing the web and reading some things while I'm sitting at a table at my local Starbucks or other cafe. The other day, I printed out the main page of/. just as a printer test at work, and brought it with me on my lunch break at Starbucks yesterday, along with my newspaper, and the "Version Fatigue" story, which I printed elsewhere as a test (rather practical things, than a stupid Windows Test Page). I enjoyed my printouts over a latte, and wished that I could have read other sections, and so on. I would not want to try to type on a tablet PC, but if it was light, and could be held in one hand easily, like I did my printouts, I would be quite pleased. I have a Zaurus, but the screen is still a bit too small for comfortable reading of a large page.
Since there does not appear to be anything good on TV tonight (no real marathons for me, and I don't have Sci-Fi), I will be catching up on some work on a site I maintain, doing some research, and doing a bit of programming in Java and Perl.
I don't exactly want to bring up holy/flame wars, but I am slightly disturbed to see the other site (k5) in the OSDN combo box. I am surprised that OSDN pushed to get that in. I guess it was allowed for fairness, but that's almost as bad as the Microsoft ads in Linux Magazine. Additionally, I see that there is no longer an OSDN box on the left, it seems to have made the left column a few pixels thinner.
Slashdot Mirror
`cd` is pretty useful, no?
I've got to say - I rather like iTunes. It works quite well for my basic needs, and it almost feels like its randomization has AI, as it comes up with some amazing mixes. I find it extremely easy to use, and sometimes, that's not a bad thing. When I go home, I use a system I cobbled together to play my music (a mix of Perl, Apache (or thttpd), mpg321/ogg123, and general Linux fun), and I quite like that method too, but when I've got to use my Windows box at work, I find it to be a simple smooth way to go. The *only* serious deficiency is the inability to properly play Oggs [Ogg Vorbis files, for the pedantic] (Ogg streams, in particular - so I can play via an SSH tunnel to home). If Apple adds this in, I will be extremely happy!
Holy sh*t! Uhh...that still works in IE6SP1 on my XP machine at work. I updated this machine just half an hour ago, with the last 4 updates, and it still appears. The box is misaligned, though, because I don't use the gumdrop gooey crap, so my address bar is a couple of pixels higher up. A smart JS vulnerability would probably calculate all the pertinent details about browser location (I believe you can access the top left pixel location of the browser window as well as the top left pixel location of the 'canvas,' and you could probably do the math based on that (assuming the user didn't move the address bar)). I don't screw around with JS in that manner, but I've got Javascript: The Definitive Guide, for when I have to mess around with a poorly written webmail page. I'm rather glad I don't use IE :).
Indeed - while I was doing a lot of spam fighting at work, I reviewed a honeypot I'd set up, and was amazed. I used mutt to review the messages, and found a couple of messages where the text part was a page or two from "The Wizard of Oz" and the nasty offer for some kind of auto insurance or other crap was in the HTML section, replete with hidden hash busters behind color backgrounds. These guys are sharp - they must be paying some smart programmers a lot of money, and it's only sad that they've sunk to such levels.
A very good question, I'd have to say (don't forget quotes, exclamation points, or curly braces, for that matter). I suppose she must have resorted to using the shift key then. Which begs the question, "Why for the love of [something], didn't she use the shift key 'normally?'" I don't know, nor do I care. She's gone!!!! (I'm sorry, after having her singing parts of "Eminem" songs in lab, I got pretty pissed off with her.)
I did the same thing after I got fed up with the key, and found a nice utility to remap it on my Windows machine at work - life's so much easier that way.
I had one programming student (in Java) who did this, and it absolutely infuriated me - how could anyone be that stupid? I really doubt that she had a disability that kept her from holding down the shift key whilst pressing the letter to be capitalized. Then again, that girl was a real piece of work. So in addition to getting a lot of grief from her, I'd have deal with her slow typing when we get to things like: StringBuffer myBuffer=new StringBuffer(); /* ARGH!!! */
I'll take that one a bit further: Here's a post of mine, citing how that article (in *August*) was yet another dupe. All said and done, I do intend to build one such system for myself, and have been building up an array of dead hard drives at work :).
No, not true. What the parent poster was saying is that to cause a serious effect on your system, you will get an authentication dialog box that requires you to enter the admin password. Even if you have this password, it will make you think twice, or at least put some accountability on you. In Windows, if you log in as Administrator (as most home computers ship), the malware will install with no security prompting whatsoever, as your logon credentials are enough for Windows.
- Log in as an admin.
- Add the user to the Administrator's group
- Log in as the user
- Install the stupid piece of 'multi-user' software known as Palm Deskop under the user's login
- Log out
- As admin, revoke those Admin privileges - I'll be damned if they're going to have admin privileges
What this does is to install the files in Progra~1 with the user's SID assigned as Creator, giving them the required rights in the future. Otherwise, if you install it as a regular admin user, when you log on as the end user, it sh*ts itself, having no ability to write the files into the folder. The files *should* be written out to the ~/App Data folder, but that would be a proper implementation - why should they be bothered to do that? Oh, and if you're not lucky, this still won't work, and you'll have to grant Full Control to that folder to the end user. No *nix program would be this stupid. There is a clear differentiation between app binaries, libraries, global config files -and- user data & config files. It is obvious in Win2k that M$ tried to copy this model, particularly with the more obvious "Documents & Settings" 'folder' that is an overly wordy equivalent toI just filled in my grad school application on a typewriter - I've got an old Smith-Corona *electric* typewriter in my attic. It works fine, and got the job done quickly. Sure, I could have scanned the thing in, probably set it as a backdrop in a Scribus document, and filled the stuff in, but I don't mind the thing. The only annoying thing would be the lack of a backspace key, which is why one must be even more vigilant about not making typos. The real irony of the application process was that the application itself was PDF, but it wasn't a fill-in form. Perhaps I could have imported it into a piece of software (and I may have a copy of Adobe Acrobat in the software cabinet @ work somewhere that I could have set up for that case), but it just didn't feel like it was worth the effort. I also find some enjoyment in the use of old, functional technology.
Damn...that bug has haunted and infuriated me many times before - I hadn't gone so far as to look in Bugzilla, though. Alas, there's only so many things I can take the time to do. I don't know when the last time is that I got that bug, or for that matter, if this is supposed to affect both Mozilla (App. Suite) *and* MozFirebird, or just the former. I use the latter, and this used to get me all the time, but maybe I'm just being more careful about what I do, and not getting it by chance. These days I just have to deal with it spontaneously locking up, most commonly after if freaks out on a drag-and-drop that I wasn't even trying to do. I either have to let it crash and burn, as it locks all kbd & mouse activity in X11, or go to tty1, and just do a `!killall`.
Yeah, I've noticed this pattern as well - and I've just been studying a mess of spam today to try and train a crappy spam filter. In my dept., we're speculating that some of this meaningless crap spam is actually an attack of some sort, designed to slow down e-mail systems, and/or crush them (think really small offices). There cannot be any real purpose to some of the spam out there - you would have to be brain dead to respond to some of the absolutely crappy messages that are being sent. It is entirely possible that some of these pointless spams might actually serve one other purpose - validating e-mail addresses through IMG message-tracking tags. (As such, I've been very carefully examining e-mails inside my favorite MUA - mutt :-).)
When I visited SF, I found the Golden Gate Perk to be a very nice Internet cafe. They offered free wireless, with a revolving key handed out with your receipt. Alas, on my really old Win95 laptop, which I just lug about as portable TTY (I pretty much run PuTTY full screen on it exclusively), refused to configure itself correctly, so I paid a small amount of money to use their workstations, and the owner allowed my to hook up my computer to the wired network, in lieu of the computer I would otherwise pay to use. From a security point of view, I much preferred this scenario, as everything went encrypted between my laptop and my server, with no risk of keystroke loggers. Furthermore, due to some glitch, the PCs there just refused to address a server of mine, the IP address and/or DNS was just being flat out denied, so the laptop was the best solution (it would have been great if the wireless would have worked :-/) - and besides, who doesn't love links?
Absolutely beautiful - it's a good thing my coworkers aren't here to hear me laughing quite this much.
There's a surprisingly good reason for that one - try enabling Num Lock on a laptop*. There's a key you can set in the registry to enable Num Lock, but it only comes on after you log on, so that you won't be messing up your password with numbers by mistake.
*Given the default hardware profile that laptops present these days, it's awfully hard (particularly for Windows' 'high quality' hardware detection) to tell if a keyboard is a real one, or a laptop.
Drat, looks like I'm going to have to set up an alias. I'm rather accustomed to typing !ph from bash these days (calls up `phoenix &`). I second prior comments about telling people I know about the aforementioned browser. I have raved about how great Phoenix is, and now if I mention Firebird, I'll have to find some way to make it clear that it's the same thing. I bet my boss it going to have some comment to make about this - he likes to make fun of the names of a bunch of Linux programs (though kind of unjustified at times - he thinks they sound silly).
Java is not purely an interpreted language - it goes through a first level of compilation to 'byte code,' which is executed by the Java Virtual Machine, running on any of the supported platforms. You can distribute Java programs without the source code, as .class or .jar files.
from the reposting-four-month-old-stories dept.
Hmmm, I rather liked this mod, after having read it here. I even mentioned it about a month ago in some thread about DJ's and hard drives, having recalled reading it here. To find the link to this wondrous dupe, I simply pressed ALT-F2 from KDE, typed `gg:hard drive speakers site:slashdot.org`, and the very first hit was the article.
Lest we forget about Afrotech's Hard-disk Sound System mentioned on /. a couple of months back. I've now got a couple of dead hard drives from work, so maybe this will be a good project to try.
I was quite glad to see this feature put in there. Countless times I have gone to people's offices, and asked them "Did you really want to have your toolbars/menu bars arranged like that?" 95% of the time, they didn't - but didn't know how they did it, or how to fix it. While I like the "Quick Launch" bar in Windows, and like to be able to change the length of it, I invariably find people muck it up, taking up nearly all of the taskbar, and don't know how to change it back. XP also has a "Lock Toolbars" feature, to prevent this. There are a few rare cases where people really do want a tiny area for their running applications (they probably want to hide the titles), but I consider it a waste of space. Disclaimer: I am a KDE user, I deal with this Windows stuff at work. I would not recommend XP to anyone, but have tried it in the interest of preparing screenshots for network configuration instructions. I am glad to see that KDE now has a "Quick Launcher" applet for Kicker, so I am not wasting valuable screen space on application icons. I hate the fact that RedHat ships with icons for nearly all the KOffice apps down there (a KDE default, IIRC), and more, cluttering Kicker tremendously - Mandrake has less unncessary icons included (they support KDE). Since I'm currently using 1024x768, there is precious little space for running apps if Kicker is not setup neatly. I have finally tweaked it to be relatively efficient, though the fuzzy clock makes the running apps section smaller at times, but I just love my fuzzy clock.
I would love a Tablet PC for surfing the web and reading some things while I'm sitting at a table at my local Starbucks or other cafe. The other day, I printed out the main page of /. just as a printer test at work, and brought it with me on my lunch break at Starbucks yesterday, along with my newspaper, and the "Version Fatigue" story, which I printed elsewhere as a test (rather practical things, than a stupid Windows Test Page). I enjoyed my printouts over a latte, and wished that I could have read other sections, and so on. I would not want to try to type on a tablet PC, but if it was light, and could be held in one hand easily, like I did my printouts, I would be quite pleased. I have a Zaurus, but the screen is still a bit too small for comfortable reading of a large page.
I've often heard of it referred to as Toolkit Without An Interesting Name.
Since there does not appear to be anything good on TV tonight (no real marathons for me, and I don't have Sci-Fi), I will be catching up on some work on a site I maintain, doing some research, and doing a bit of programming in Java and Perl.
I don't exactly want to bring up holy/flame wars, but I am slightly disturbed to see the other site (k5) in the OSDN combo box. I am surprised that OSDN pushed to get that in. I guess it was allowed for fairness, but that's almost as bad as the Microsoft ads in Linux Magazine. Additionally, I see that there is no longer an OSDN box on the left, it seems to have made the left column a few pixels thinner.