My litmus test for an antivirus is: 1. Install the subject in a virtual machine on a freshly installed system, at default settings. 2. Imitate a stupid user starting a known malware. (Obtaining a sample of a known malware is left as an exercise for the reader.)
* A good antivirus blocks the starting and informs the user. * A bad antivirus allows the system to be infected. * A so-so antivirus allows the malware to start but blocks it trying to copy itself into the Windows directory or wherever else it wants to live. I.e. it starts to act when it’s actually a bit too late.
When I last tried Microsoft Security Essentials, it failed into that last category. (Many of the free antiviruses, too. Kaspersky passed, and, as far as I remember, Avira passed too.)
All the methods suggested so far assume that identical files are bitwise identical. That’s a false assumption.
Consider an mp3 file. Add ID3 tags. Add ID3v2 tags. Re-encode to ogg. Now you have four files that have (almost) the same content but are bitwise different.
Consider a raw photo with EXIF tags. Convert it to jpeg, preserving the tags. Strip the tags. Resize to a web-friendly resolution. Now, you have 4 files which are bitwise different, but contain roughly the same image. (JPEG is a bit lossy and the downscaled version is *quite* lossy, but still.)
Consider a C++ program in source form. Build it, producing a binary and a bunch of intermediate files.
If you wanted to perfectly deduplicate this collection, you’d have to invent software that can detect all this non-bitwise duplicity.
I built a knowledge of platform-neutral C++. (What is and what isn’t possible in pure standard C++ library + Boost; when and when not to use platform-specific data types (DWORD, LPCTSTR etc.); what is standard C++ and what are Microsoft non-standard extensions to avoid.) Literature: Herb Sutter (+Jim Hyslop), Scott Meyers, Andrei Alexandrescu.
I also learned the Unix Way and applied it on Windows. (Didn’t go as far as installing Cygwin and Emacs; but Unxutils, ActivePerl, msysgit and select packages from GnuWin32 were part of my typical Windows install for a few years. Also, FAR Manager is a nice console-based Norton Commander clone that really shines when extended with Unix-like tools.) Literature: Eric Raymond.
And I migrated to fulltime Ubuntu (with a fallback dual-boot Windows installation, almost never used) on my home computers. Learned to set up an Ubuntu-server-based home router (with an iptables firewall, DHCP and DNS), a web server, an ftp server, a few Git repositories, and a VPN server to connect to home from my Windows-based job PC (not OpenVPN, mind you, but real IPsec compatible with the out-of-the-box Windows VPN client). This made me learn how services are installed, configured and controlled on Debian, which files go where, how to avoid building software from sources etc.
Then I came to an interview, demonstrated my C++ skills and said that, despite my ten-year Windows experience, I want to work in the *nix team and to learn new (and undeservedly forgotten old) languages. Was hired pretty quickly and with a competitive salary.
I was a user of KDE3. Then KDE4 happened. It (temporarily?) lost keyboard hotkey configurability, a feature that I regarded as definitive (i.e. *the* reason to run KDE vs. GNOME). And it had that newfangled gimmick named Plasma, designed for people who see their desktop more often than they work.
At roughly that time, GNOME got the equivalent keyboard shortcut settings panel, so I migrated there.
Afterwards, GNOME3 happened and it lost *its* definitive feature (the customizable and multimonitor-friendly panel). So I migrated to the next DE that had that (Xfce).
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My litmus test for an antivirus is:
1. Install the subject in a virtual machine on a freshly installed system, at default settings.
2. Imitate a stupid user starting a known malware. (Obtaining a sample of a known malware is left as an exercise for the reader.)
* A good antivirus blocks the starting and informs the user.
* A bad antivirus allows the system to be infected.
* A so-so antivirus allows the malware to start but blocks it trying to copy itself into the Windows directory or wherever else it wants to live. I.e. it starts to act when it’s actually a bit too late.
When I last tried Microsoft Security Essentials, it failed into that last category. (Many of the free antiviruses, too. Kaspersky passed, and, as far as I remember, Avira passed too.)
All the methods suggested so far assume that identical files are bitwise identical. That’s a false assumption.
Consider an mp3 file. Add ID3 tags. Add ID3v2 tags. Re-encode to ogg. Now you have four files that have (almost) the same content but are bitwise different.
Consider a raw photo with EXIF tags. Convert it to jpeg, preserving the tags. Strip the tags. Resize to a web-friendly resolution. Now, you have 4 files which are bitwise different, but contain roughly the same image. (JPEG is a bit lossy and the downscaled version is *quite* lossy, but still.)
Consider a C++ program in source form. Build it, producing a binary and a bunch of intermediate files.
If you wanted to perfectly deduplicate this collection, you’d have to invent software that can detect all this non-bitwise duplicity.
I built a knowledge of platform-neutral C++. (What is and what isn’t possible in pure standard C++ library + Boost; when and when not to use platform-specific data types (DWORD, LPCTSTR etc.); what is standard C++ and what are Microsoft non-standard extensions to avoid.) Literature: Herb Sutter (+Jim Hyslop), Scott Meyers, Andrei Alexandrescu.
I also learned the Unix Way and applied it on Windows. (Didn’t go as far as installing Cygwin and Emacs; but Unxutils, ActivePerl, msysgit and select packages from GnuWin32 were part of my typical Windows install for a few years. Also, FAR Manager is a nice console-based Norton Commander clone that really shines when extended with Unix-like tools.) Literature: Eric Raymond.
And I migrated to fulltime Ubuntu (with a fallback dual-boot Windows installation, almost never used) on my home computers. Learned to set up an Ubuntu-server-based home router (with an iptables firewall, DHCP and DNS), a web server, an ftp server, a few Git repositories, and a VPN server to connect to home from my Windows-based job PC (not OpenVPN, mind you, but real IPsec compatible with the out-of-the-box Windows VPN client). This made me learn how services are installed, configured and controlled on Debian, which files go where, how to avoid building software from sources etc.
Then I came to an interview, demonstrated my C++ skills and said that, despite my ten-year Windows experience, I want to work in the *nix team and to learn new (and undeservedly forgotten old) languages. Was hired pretty quickly and with a competitive salary.
Let me get this right, he is 8 and you read to him? At that age, children should be able to read on their own.
I was a user of KDE3. Then KDE4 happened. It (temporarily?) lost keyboard hotkey configurability, a feature that I regarded as definitive (i.e. *the* reason to run KDE vs. GNOME). And it had that newfangled gimmick named Plasma, designed for people who see their desktop more often than they work.
At roughly that time, GNOME got the equivalent keyboard shortcut settings panel, so I migrated there.
Afterwards, GNOME3 happened and it lost *its* definitive feature (the customizable and multimonitor-friendly panel). So I migrated to the next DE that had that (Xfce).
GnuCash seems to have some tax-related features. Not being a US citizen, I never bothered to learn them.
It is not the lack of extensions that stops people from using Opera. It's that they bundle features that should be extensions right into the core.