Mod up the parent. If the Gimp was made to look and work like Photoshop, it would be so much easier to get people to convert across. Is this possible with the existing 'skins' framework, or would it need new code?
*Risks the wrath of the moderators by going off topic to release a bee from a bonnet*
Finally! Someone else notices the problem!
I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories, but I'm sure floppy disks aren't as reliable as they used to be. I can remember carting 3.5" disks around the place for *ages* before they died out... now it seems that if you drop one of the things then it will become unusable.
So, who is behind it? Is it the manufacturers of the floppy drives, or the manufacturers of the floppy disks? Have Iomega secretly bought out every single one of the floppy disk manufacturers?
Oh well, it gives an opportunity for even young people to state 'They don't make them like they used to':)
Access 2000 seemed to open the database fine, I took a peek at some of the tables just to make sure. Here's a non-protected copy for those that are interested:
Trouble is, I don't have a credit card handy, so I can't buy it. Can someone buy it and find out the password? Mail it to me, after you've mailed it to them if you like.
The file you download is a zip file containing 3 floppy disk sized images. The file format? Microsoft Backup 1.0, which made it's debut way back in the MS-DOS 6 / Win 3.1 days.
Except you would be able to tell which bits are 'tags' and which bits are 'data'. In an ordinary binary format like the Word data format that's probably quite hard to work out.
*WARNING* Some moderators may see this post as a Pro Microsoft Post (TM). It is advised that they do not read it, to avoid raised blood pressure on their part and decreased karma on mine.;P
The reason Macs are included is because you are licensing *all* of the products in one yearly payment. i.e. you pay £40 per computer (in the UK) and you get to use the latest Office, Windows, Works, CALs, Encarta and Visual Studio on any computer. If you look closer that does also include a terminal services CAL for each computer so if you're stuck on P133s you can still use the School Agreement to 'run' 2K and Office XP on all of your computers with a meaty enough server.
I don't know how much of the above software applies to Macs, but I know Office does and the CALs probably do too. I think MS included Macs not only to make money but also so that it would be a 'catch all' agreement - one of the really attractive things to schools is that it means no more worrying and auditing software - just add up the total number of PCs and install as much MS software from the list as you like on them. What's even nicer is that when you get new computers you don't pay for the licensing until the agreement is renewed at the end of the year, so you get up to 364 days free software usage.
To be honest for some schools it's a good idea. If schools are mostly MS shops (like the one that I work in), then it gives you the opportunity to standardise on versions of Office (instead of 95, 97, 2000 and XP) and Windows (instead of a mishmash of 95, 98, 2k and NT4), *and* upgrade when new versions come out. To be honest, if MS was the only option this would be a great deal - £40 per year for all Windows and Office upgrades would easily work out cheaper if you wanted to stay cutting edge.
I'm torn with the School Agreement. On the one side I do genuinely think that Windows is a better platform for education ATM (having tried out K12LTSP and so on), but on the other side it seems like a huge amount of money and the idea of renting software is something I'm very wary of. Maybe in a year's time Linux will be a superior contendor - let's wait and see!
I'm also a schools administrator, and the exact same problem has actually been neatly resolved for me by my ISP... because we have Internet access supplied by our local County Council, we only have access to a (filtered) web proxy and the smtp/pop3/imap/rtsp ports, which is very nice.
So when users come and say 'why can't I use xyz' I can just say 'The county council block it!' A tad annoying when I want to use rsync or get to a website that is blocked by the proxy like certain security / cracking sites, but that's why I run a squid proxy on my home computer on the imap port;)
Admittedly, it doesn't solve this person's solution, but making it impossible in a way that is genuinely out of your control is very nice sometimes.
However, on a practical note... as a schools IT administrator IMHO there are some decisions that have to be made that will inevitably bring flak. I'd probably block the ports and put on your bullet proof vest if I were you.
How about instead of stopping it working, just put in a warning like many virus scanners do.
e.g. "Your copy of BIND is 6 months old. It is recommended that you upgrade to the latest version in order to prevent security holes."
You could either email it to root (maybe a bit annoying) or you could display it on startup (less likely to be seen on low-reboot or physically inaccessible machines). You could also be really radical and make it *beep*!;)
It'd have to be pretty visible, as the sort of people that are being targetted here are admins who don't really care about updates. Any sensible sysadmin will have updated their servers long before the 6 month timeout. I reckon emailing root *and* putting up the startup warning would be best. And of course there'd have to be an (compile time?) option to disable it too.
'The client generates a series of random numbers to use as an encryption key. This is number is exchanged with the server through a secure process known only to Prescient, the server uses it to encrypt any information it sends back to the client, and then the key is destroyed and a new one is created. This process is repeated every time information is exchanged between the client and the server, making it virtually impossible for outsiders to decrypt the information.'
Isn't this still vulnerable to man-in-the-middle? If you can intercept communication between client and server you can get the pads. Sounds to me like it's only the fact that the process for transfer is obscure that prevents this. Security by obscurity.
Sorry for the blatant Microsoft bashing, but I really did laugh out loud at this one. It should read:
'No wonder Windows makes you feel boxed in. It ties you to an inflexible system (closed source). It requires you to pay for expensive experts (and licenses). It makes you struggle daily with a server environment that's more dumbed down than ever.'
Over restrictiveness is a pain, but don't forget that licensing issues are also at stake. It's far too easy for a company employee to install some 'less than legal' software on their work computer, and when the BSA come round visiting the company has to take the blame and the fine.
As far as I can remember, NVIDIA have a neat testing system that tests the nightly builds of their drivers to see if performance has gone up, down or the same. If I remember rightly the developers who submit patches that slow things down get a ribbing the next day:)
is if when they released the patch for the security flaw they made the patch GPL... just imagine Microsoft having to recode all that stuff for themselves:)
While what you're saying is going a bit too far, one good thing that Microsoft do do is inform the clueless user about what they're doing and the consequences. Whilst the information does tend to be intended to glorify Microsoft quite often, if you let someone know that 'This file is an attachment, don't run it if you don't know who it's from or weren't expecting it', it's *good*.
So it might be nice if there was a generic Internet warning when you first load it up. We get annoyed by this sort of thing (maybe we need a 'turn off tips and hints' button), if users understood a little bit more about the Internet maybe there wouldn't be so many worms, virii, hoaxes and chain-mails-in-aid-of-dying-children.
What a shame that WINE isn't a GPLed product. If this isn't a hoax this looks very much like a modified, patched version of WINE.
But because WINE doesn't use the GPL, the code changes probably aren't going to be distributed to the general public, so we'll end up with one Linux distro with a better Windows emulator than the rest of them.:(
You're right - initially people would run their copy of Office XP directly on Lindows, and save the money. Open Source office programs would be largely neglected, *but still developed*.
But now lets fast forward a year in the corporate timeline. Company X wants to buy 50 new computers and therefore needs 50 licenses for Office YQ. They're running Lindows.
Bright spark A says 'Hey, we're running that Lindows thing now. I hear that Open Office 2003 is actually just as good as Office, and it's free, and it also supports our current Office XP files! Now that we've got Lindows it'll be a cinch to get it working!'
Managers love the cost savings, and hence the business starts to migrate to Open Office.
The fact that Linux apps are free of restrictive licenses will mean that people will start to migrate to them. Lindows, if it works, is an important stepping stone.
1) Get anyone who wants to rate sites to make an account. Yes, it's a pain, but that way you can track people's rating activities, like on/.
2) Use the Yahoo! style system of having an image that you have to type the word in from to create an account. Keep changing the way the image is formed. This should *help* to prevent account creation spam.
3) Give people a certain number of points per day / week / month (ala/.)
4) Make it so that everyone has to balance out +ves and -ves - that is, somehow make sure that they can't just do one or the other.
5) Make it so that each account can only rate a particular site once. Now this requires quite a bit of storage, because you've got to store every rating ever individually instead of just a counter, but that way you can prevent multiple rating on some corporate site.
Note that this prevents the idea of rating a site based on how appropriate it is for a particular search, which is admittedly one of the really exciting parts of this (that is, if I search for Transistors and get www.electronics.com then I rate it 'Good'. If I search for Open Source and get www.electronics.com then I rate it as 'Bad'.)
With this system instead of this I just rate www.electronics.com according to how good the site is, not how relevant it is. Maybe that's what they're aiming for, maybe it's not.
I think that would help stop it but it all depends on the security of the account creation process - if it's easy to spam then the whole system becomes a waste of time.
It also doesn't prevent the problem of people being paid for ratings, which is possible, or for a company getting every single one of its employees to vote for the company. Thinking about that, one solution could be to just say that a company's rating can't go above a certain level and can only increase at a certain speed.
Or you could have metamoderation. This sounds more and more like Slash based code all the time!
This happens all the time. Some company creates a new format that can store more 'stuff' in less space, but only a very select few ever reach the general market. It's because DVD itself has only just been taken up by the general public, and that took long enough. If Matsushita release another format what happens to the millions who already bought their non-compatible DVD players? They're not going to be too happy.
The industry can only handle a major change in storage once every 10 or so years. First we moved from floppy discs to CDs, and now from CDs to DVDs. All that happens is that denser storage formats are researched and researched, and then when the old formats have been stretched to breaking points (see Windows 95, released on 20 or so floppy discs), then there is a big push and we all move over to the technology that has the right balance of advancement and maturity at the time - CD and DVD were just the lucky ones who were around at the right time.
So this research is useful, but 100GB discs probably won't ever reach the mainstream. The next 'step up' that really gets mass support will probably be in the multi-terabyte range.
Exactly the same experience here. One drive died because of a power supply problem, and I got an advance RMA for that. Fortunately I was able to switch the controller boards when I still had both drives and so kept my data. But last month the drive started clicking and grinding, and sure enough the 'Primary Drive Fails' error wasn't far behind. RMAd again, and got the OEM 60GXP model mentioned above instead.
Anyone who has studied Welfare Economics should know that this is a perfect example of a public good. One of the characteristics of such a good is that it is 'Non-excludable', which means that in effect you can't stop someone from using the good even if they don't pay for it. This leads to 'free riding', or a situation where people benefit from the good without paying for it.
The trouble with public goods though is that free market's just don't provide them - the government has to intervene to provide them. And we all know what state provided television can be like (see the BBC - I hope noone gets offended, but compared to people like Sky they're complete rubbish mostly)
So what has happened here is that the maker of the good has tried to make the good 'excludable' with legal restrictions. As many people are suggesting, it would be possible to use technical restrictions instead, but consider that if you're going to use technical restrictions that means money, and who's going to be the person who has to pay for it in the end? That's right, you and I.
So all of you who are saying that if they're transmitting the signal you should be able to use what you like, then if you continue down that path you're either going to end up with your telly license going up in price because technical barriers must be put in place, or the companies going out of business because they can't stop people just using the signal for what they like. I think we can agree that both of these things are A Bad Thing compared with the simple system at the moment of just paying your money to get the programs. It's also something which is rarely found these days - Honest.
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Mod up the parent. If the Gimp was made to look and work like Photoshop, it would be so much easier to get people to convert across. Is this possible with the existing 'skins' framework, or would it need new code?
*Risks the wrath of the moderators by going off topic to release a bee from a bonnet*
:)
Finally! Someone else notices the problem!
I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories, but I'm sure floppy disks aren't as reliable as they used to be. I can remember carting 3.5" disks around the place for *ages* before they died out... now it seems that if you drop one of the things then it will become unusable.
So, who is behind it? Is it the manufacturers of the floppy drives, or the manufacturers of the floppy disks? Have Iomega secretly bought out every single one of the floppy disk manufacturers?
Oh well, it gives an opportunity for even young people to state 'They don't make them like they used to'
I had to rebuild the backup catalogue before it would work, so that's probably why. (I used the Windows version of the backup software)
Access 2000 seemed to open the database fine, I took a peek at some of the tables just to make sure. Here's a non-protected copy for those that are interested:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/minkus/DBASEWIN.zip
Files successfully extracted and emailed, using my old copy of MS-DOS 6.2 Backup, with the compliments of Slashdot :)
I'm almost certain that the following software will get the password they're looking for:
http://www.lostpassword.com/backup.htm
Trouble is, I don't have a credit card handy, so I can't buy it. Can someone buy it and find out the password? Mail it to me, after you've mailed it to them if you like.
The files are actually password protected in the Microsoft Backup format! Any ideas?
Hurdle number one in Database Password Retrieval:
:)
The file you download is a zip file containing 3 floppy disk sized images. The file format? Microsoft Backup 1.0, which made it's debut way back in the MS-DOS 6 / Win 3.1 days.
Time to dig out the old disks, guys
Except you would be able to tell which bits are 'tags' and which bits are 'data'. In an ordinary binary format like the Word data format that's probably quite hard to work out.
*WARNING* Some moderators may see this post as a Pro Microsoft Post (TM). It is advised that they do not read it, to avoid raised blood pressure on their part and decreased karma on mine. ;P
The reason Macs are included is because you are licensing *all* of the products in one yearly payment. i.e. you pay £40 per computer (in the UK) and you get to use the latest Office, Windows, Works, CALs, Encarta and Visual Studio on any computer. If you look closer that does also include a terminal services CAL for each computer so if you're stuck on P133s you can still use the School Agreement to 'run' 2K and Office XP on all of your computers with a meaty enough server.
I don't know how much of the above software applies to Macs, but I know Office does and the CALs probably do too. I think MS included Macs not only to make money but also so that it would be a 'catch all' agreement - one of the really attractive things to schools is that it means no more worrying and auditing software - just add up the total number of PCs and install as much MS software from the list as you like on them. What's even nicer is that when you get new computers you don't pay for the licensing until the agreement is renewed at the end of the year, so you get up to 364 days free software usage.
To be honest for some schools it's a good idea. If schools are mostly MS shops (like the one that I work in), then it gives you the opportunity to standardise on versions of Office (instead of 95, 97, 2000 and XP) and Windows (instead of a mishmash of 95, 98, 2k and NT4), *and* upgrade when new versions come out. To be honest, if MS was the only option this would be a great deal - £40 per year for all Windows and Office upgrades would easily work out cheaper if you wanted to stay cutting edge.
I'm torn with the School Agreement. On the one side I do genuinely think that Windows is a better platform for education ATM (having tried out K12LTSP and so on), but on the other side it seems like a huge amount of money and the idea of renting software is something I'm very wary of. Maybe in a year's time Linux will be a superior contendor - let's wait and see!
I'm also a schools administrator, and the exact same problem has actually been neatly resolved for me by my ISP... because we have Internet access supplied by our local County Council, we only have access to a (filtered) web proxy and the smtp/pop3/imap/rtsp ports, which is very nice.
;)
So when users come and say 'why can't I use xyz' I can just say 'The county council block it!' A tad annoying when I want to use rsync or get to a website that is blocked by the proxy like certain security / cracking sites, but that's why I run a squid proxy on my home computer on the imap port
Admittedly, it doesn't solve this person's solution, but making it impossible in a way that is genuinely out of your control is very nice sometimes.
However, on a practical note... as a schools IT administrator IMHO there are some decisions that have to be made that will inevitably bring flak. I'd probably block the ports and put on your bullet proof vest if I were you.
How about instead of stopping it working, just put in a warning like many virus scanners do.
;)
e.g. "Your copy of BIND is 6 months old. It is recommended that you upgrade to the latest version in order to prevent security holes."
You could either email it to root (maybe a bit annoying) or you could display it on startup (less likely to be seen on low-reboot or physically inaccessible machines). You could also be really radical and make it *beep*!
It'd have to be pretty visible, as the sort of people that are being targetted here are admins who don't really care about updates. Any sensible sysadmin will have updated their servers long before the 6 month timeout. I reckon emailing root *and* putting up the startup warning would be best. And of course there'd have to be an (compile time?) option to disable it too.
'The client generates a series of random numbers to use as an encryption key. This is number is exchanged with the server through a secure process known only to Prescient, the server uses it to encrypt any information it sends back to the client, and then the key is destroyed and a new one is created. This process is repeated every time information is exchanged between the client and the server, making it virtually impossible for outsiders to decrypt the information.'
Isn't this still vulnerable to man-in-the-middle? If you can intercept communication between client and server you can get the pads. Sounds to me like it's only the fact that the process for transfer is obscure that prevents this. Security by obscurity.
Sorry for the blatant Microsoft bashing, but I really did laugh out loud at this one. It should read:
'No wonder Windows makes you feel boxed in. It ties you to an inflexible system (closed source). It requires you to pay for expensive experts (and licenses). It makes you struggle daily with a server environment that's more dumbed down than ever.'
Over restrictiveness is a pain, but don't forget that licensing issues are also at stake. It's far too easy for a company employee to install some 'less than legal' software on their work computer, and when the BSA come round visiting the company has to take the blame and the fine.
In that case it's a good thing that Microsoft made this decision last year or else they'd be blocking those poor AOL users :)
As far as I can remember, NVIDIA have a neat testing system that tests the nightly builds of their drivers to see if performance has gone up, down or the same. If I remember rightly the developers who submit patches that slow things down get a ribbing the next day :)
Computer automated testing is our friend.
is if when they released the patch for the security flaw they made the patch GPL... just imagine Microsoft having to recode all that stuff for themselves :)
While what you're saying is going a bit too far, one good thing that Microsoft do do is inform the clueless user about what they're doing and the consequences. Whilst the information does tend to be intended to glorify Microsoft quite often, if you let someone know that 'This file is an attachment, don't run it if you don't know who it's from or weren't expecting it', it's *good*.
So it might be nice if there was a generic Internet warning when you first load it up. We get annoyed by this sort of thing (maybe we need a 'turn off tips and hints' button), if users understood a little bit more about the Internet maybe there wouldn't be so many worms, virii, hoaxes and chain-mails-in-aid-of-dying-children.
What a shame that WINE isn't a GPLed product. If this isn't a hoax this looks very much like a modified, patched version of WINE.
:(
But because WINE doesn't use the GPL, the code changes probably aren't going to be distributed to the general public, so we'll end up with one Linux distro with a better Windows emulator than the rest of them.
You're right - initially people would run their copy of Office XP directly on Lindows, and save the money. Open Source office programs would be largely neglected, *but still developed*.
But now lets fast forward a year in the corporate timeline. Company X wants to buy 50 new computers and therefore needs 50 licenses for Office YQ. They're running Lindows.
Bright spark A says 'Hey, we're running that Lindows thing now. I hear that Open Office 2003 is actually just as good as Office, and it's free, and it also supports our current Office XP files! Now that we've got Lindows it'll be a cinch to get it working!'
Managers love the cost savings, and hence the business starts to migrate to Open Office.
The fact that Linux apps are free of restrictive licenses will mean that people will start to migrate to them. Lindows, if it works, is an important stepping stone.
1) Get anyone who wants to rate sites to make an account. Yes, it's a pain, but that way you can track people's rating activities, like on /.
/.)
2) Use the Yahoo! style system of having an image that you have to type the word in from to create an account. Keep changing the way the image is formed. This should *help* to prevent account creation spam.
3) Give people a certain number of points per day / week / month (ala
4) Make it so that everyone has to balance out +ves and -ves - that is, somehow make sure that they can't just do one or the other.
5) Make it so that each account can only rate a particular site once. Now this requires quite a bit of storage, because you've got to store every rating ever individually instead of just a counter, but that way you can prevent multiple rating on some corporate site.
Note that this prevents the idea of rating a site based on how appropriate it is for a particular search, which is admittedly one of the really exciting parts of this (that is, if I search for Transistors and get www.electronics.com then I rate it 'Good'. If I search for Open Source and get www.electronics.com then I rate it as 'Bad'.)
With this system instead of this I just rate www.electronics.com according to how good the site is, not how relevant it is. Maybe that's what they're aiming for, maybe it's not.
I think that would help stop it but it all depends on the security of the account creation process - if it's easy to spam then the whole system becomes a waste of time.
It also doesn't prevent the problem of people being paid for ratings, which is possible, or for a company getting every single one of its employees to vote for the company. Thinking about that, one solution could be to just say that a company's rating can't go above a certain level and can only increase at a certain speed.
Or you could have metamoderation. This sounds more and more like Slash based code all the time!
This happens all the time. Some company creates a new format that can store more 'stuff' in less space, but only a very select few ever reach the general market. It's because DVD itself has only just been taken up by the general public, and that took long enough. If Matsushita release another format what happens to the millions who already bought their non-compatible DVD players? They're not going to be too happy.
The industry can only handle a major change in storage once every 10 or so years. First we moved from floppy discs to CDs, and now from CDs to DVDs. All that happens is that denser storage formats are researched and researched, and then when the old formats have been stretched to breaking points (see Windows 95, released on 20 or so floppy discs), then there is a big push and we all move over to the technology that has the right balance of advancement and maturity at the time - CD and DVD were just the lucky ones who were around at the right time.
So this research is useful, but 100GB discs probably won't ever reach the mainstream. The next 'step up' that really gets mass support will probably be in the multi-terabyte range.
Exactly the same experience here. One drive died because of a power supply problem, and I got an advance RMA for that. Fortunately I was able to switch the controller boards when I still had both drives and so kept my data. But last month the drive started clicking and grinding, and sure enough the 'Primary Drive Fails' error wasn't far behind. RMAd again, and got the OEM 60GXP model mentioned above instead.
Anyone who has studied Welfare Economics should know that this is a perfect example of a public good. One of the characteristics of such a good is that it is 'Non-excludable', which means that in effect you can't stop someone from using the good even if they don't pay for it. This leads to 'free riding', or a situation where people benefit from the good without paying for it.
The trouble with public goods though is that free market's just don't provide them - the government has to intervene to provide them. And we all know what state provided television can be like (see the BBC - I hope noone gets offended, but compared to people like Sky they're complete rubbish mostly)
So what has happened here is that the maker of the good has tried to make the good 'excludable' with legal restrictions. As many people are suggesting, it would be possible to use technical restrictions instead, but consider that if you're going to use technical restrictions that means money, and who's going to be the person who has to pay for it in the end? That's right, you and I.
So all of you who are saying that if they're transmitting the signal you should be able to use what you like, then if you continue down that path you're either going to end up with your telly license going up in price because technical barriers must be put in place, or the companies going out of business because they can't stop people just using the signal for what they like. I think we can agree that both of these things are A Bad Thing compared with the simple system at the moment of just paying your money to get the programs. It's also something which is rarely found these days - Honest.
--
' Ore stabit fortis a fine placet ore stat '