I'm not a programmer, but yes it is my understanding that sandboxing only applies to running a Java applet in a web browser or something similar.
Most Mac users aren't plagued by viruses, trojans or spyware simply because there isn't much of that stuff around for the Mac platform. This is for several reasons. One is that Macs still only represent about 5% of the computing world. Another is that Mac OS X has a better security structure and default security settings than the dominant OS. Another reason is that many Mac users are the type of people who simply don't put up with installing crap on their computer, and see no reason to install useless free junk. Mac users typically want to actually use the computer to get something done. It already looks pretty, why mess with that?;)
If your physics professors are the only people using their computers, they must not be staying on legitimate physics and news websites. Something must be out of the ordinary for them to be contracting spyware. To get spyware you have to download some software, either manually or through a bug in the browser. Your typical website catering to educators isn't going to allow that sort of automatically installing code on their website. These professors of yours must be straying off the reservation at some point, or getting it through email attachments, or quite possibly a worm.
Firefox could possibly help them if you start with a clean system, but if they are actually going out and downloading FREE ANIMATED MOUSE CURSORS!!! they will need some re-education on how to keep their computer safe. Mac + Firefox would be a vast improvement, but unless they were restricted from installing any software (yes, this can be done) they will eventually get themselves in trouble. For general web browsing it is definitely a much more secure environment, but only if you know not to do something stupid. Java is certainly more secure when using Firefox on either platform, since you aren't using the buggy MSJava implementation.
Don't stop at replacing IE with Firefox. Outlook/Outlook Express is just as bad. Apple Mail is very nice on the Mac, but Thunderbird also works, and of course is cross-platform. And none of this is going to be very effective on Windows if you don't have a solid firewall to go along with it, and anti-virus software. On the Mac, turn on the built-in firewall to increase the already decent security.
The general public is composed of people who literally can't tell the difference between Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Acrobat Reader, or Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. This is no hyperbole, I know many people with this problem and I'm sure you've met some yourself. They'll call and say, "I'm having a problem with my Adobe." Or ask you repeatedly which application you're in right now when you're both looking at the screen, even though the applications present completely different interfaces. The person usually will have been using the applications in question for months or years, and still can't tell them apart without thinking about it really hard.
Is it simple ignorance? No, that could be easily corrected. Is it sheer stupidity? No, these people are otherwise of average intelligence or better. It's some kind of weird mental blindness that comes over people whenever they are faced with a computer screen. It's conditional stupidity, and it's one of the main problems with the general public. Most of them will never learn to be careful until you hook up a car battery to their earlobes that gives them a physical notice whenever they do something stupid. Otherwise they just don't seem to be equipped mentally to grasp the concepts involved in using a computer responsibly. The software industry hasn't exactly been helping matters, but they have a monumental task ahead of them. I think computers are just too abstract for a lot of homo sapiens sapiens to deal with.
Mac OS X is wonderful, but it is not a panacaea. There isn't really any commercial spyware that I know of, but that's mostly because it's an extremely small market that doesn't justify the development time for spyware. There isn't anything technically stopping a Mac user from installing software that will send out information over the network to a third party. Most software installations require an administrator password, which is a good thing, but there are ways around that, like not using an installer and just unzipping the application onto your desktop.
There are already a couple of trojans in existence for OS X, although if you are up to date I think at least one of them no longer works. No operating system is really protected from trojans, unless you get something ultra-secure like OpenBSD and lock it down so tight that it can't be used except for a few specific tasks. Java's sandboxing may keep a Java applet on a random web page from attacking you and installing software, but if you download a separate Java application there's no reason it can't be spyware or contain some sort of trojan. Anyway, why would trojans or spyware need to be written in Java?
So no, Mac + Firefox != OK. It's a hell of a lot better than Win + IE = "pwned in 60 seconds", but you better be on your toes nevertheless. Don't open random email attachments or download kooky software off IRC. There is nothing inherently protecting Macs/Linux/*BSD or any other operating system from all possible threats. That's just not the way it works. It just has a higher default level of security than some other things we know.
Your best security on any platform is incremental backups with an offsite copy.
Ahem... Why are you pretending all/.ers are as bad as each other?
On the one hand, some/.ers do find it reasonable for spyware like yours to exist in the world, as long as it notifies the user clearly that they are selling personal information in exchange for the "free" use of this software. On the other hand even those folks will usually still class your software in the same category of the junk that unknowingly violates your privacy and bogs down your computer.
It's difficult for most people to come to the conclusion that there is such a thing as "good spyware" a.k.a. "direct advertising software", just because there are idiots in the world ready to willingly give up their rights to information privacy for money or free junk software goodies. In the end, users like that and software like yours simply chip away at our ability to keep our personal information private. Therefore all spyware is considered somewhat of a menace whether they are "legitimate" or not.
On the gripping hand, of course, if your software were really totally honest and straightforward about what it does, it wouldn't really fit the definition of "spyware", now would it? I don't know of any such software, but I will concede that it could exist. Personally I would still disapprove of it, but people have to make their own decisions about giving up their personal information.
The general public would probably give up lots of other rights in exchange for free stuff. That usually doesn't make it OK for them to do so, nor does it make it OK for someone to try to get them to do so. Even if it happens to be legal.
There seem to be a lot of people who still don't understand that LCDs don't really have a "refresh rate" like CRTs do. A CRT screen refreshes every single pixel on the screen 60 (or 75/85/90/100/120) times every second. That's why many of us can actually see the whole screen flickering with slower refresh rates. LCDs don't flicker no matter what refresh rate you tell the graphics card to use, because they don't refresh every pixel on the screen at the same time, thus no flicker. They only change the pixels that need to be changed.
The important refresh rate for LCDs is what I think they call the pixel response rate, or the speed at which each individual pixel can be changed. A slow pixel response rate is what gives you things like trails from moving objects around on the screen. The ghost image doesn't get wiped off the screen fast enough because the pixels can't be changed that fast. Well, your average modern desktop LCD has a pixel response rate less than 20 milliseconds, some are even lower. That means that mouse trails and ghost images are mostly a thing of the past. It just doesn't happen anymore. I don't even see any reason for current LCDs being bad for gaming. I watch DVDs fullscreen on my laptop all the time with no difficulty, and it is already a few years old. I'm sure the newer/better LCDs can handle Unreal and Half-Life and their brethren just fine.
By the way, to the parent poster, I'm not sure who I'm responding to. Try putting quoted text in italics and/or use a blockquote tag to separate it from your own text.
Re:Speaking of filters...
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Hacking Vodka
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Just FYI, in case you ever go ocean trekking, you actually can buy a hand-operated desalination pump for your survival raft to make fresh water from saltwater. It's considerably more difficult than removing particulates, chemicals and bacteria from fresh water. I can't find a link to where you can actually order one, but I wouldn't be surprised if a desalination pump cost several hundred or even a couple grand. Requires some sort of reverse osmosis, I think.
I work for an organization that does marine safety training, and my boss related to me a story about a couple who survived something like 68 days in a liferaft in the middle of the ocean with nothing but a little food and a hand-operated desalinator. Not sure of the date but it was some years ago, so they've been around for a while.
I think I read about that in an article on CSI:Miami. It's just color psychology. Most people don't consciously notice the color cast, they just think the reddish place is getting more direct sunlight and is thus hotter (Miami) and the bluish place is getting more overcast/shade type light, thus colder weather (New York). It gives each show a different "feel". Same thing happens in the photography field. Look up color balance, color psychology and white balance.
You probably don't realize it but a lot of the commercial images and things you see on TV are passed through a slightly reddish filter or white balanced on a slightly blue object (thus subtracting blue, the same as adding red) to "warm them up". It makes skin tones look more vibrant and everything looks more inviting and appealing, psychologically speaking. That's why things on TV often look more "real" than the everyday things you see around you. Apparently the general public doesn't like the drabness of color accurate reality.
Four pills is a little short of six months of 24/7 IV drip antibiotic treatments. What you're talking about is an order of magnitude smaller than what the guy alledgedly needs to survive this. Probably something a mere dentist is not qualified to prescribe. At least, one would hope that a dentist isn't allowed to prescribe that level of medication on his own.
Treatment. He said treatment. That's like a program, not a substance. As in, something that is normally administered by a qualified physician. He said "high-dose antibiotic treatment" because at this point in time according to what little information he has about this disease he believes that is the one and only treatment that will actually help him. He isn't an idiot, so I am willing to bet that if he were to actually see a specialist and the specialist prescribed a different treatment, he would listen. But he hasn't seen a specialist yet, and as of the writing of the letter he won't have access to one until Friday.
I don't know if you're usually an idiot, but today you are being both an idiot and an ignorant, insensitive jackass.
BTW, antibiotics have no similarity to narcotics, hallucinogens or pain killers. They don't give you a "high" or anything like that. This makes your assertion doubly ridiculous. Next time you feel like "cutting to the chase", do yourself and all of us a favor. Don't.
Have you A) called the phone number(s) listed in the letter, or B) emailed this information including your cousin's contact info to the email address he listed in the letter, with "[HELP]" as part of the subject line, as he specified?
Remember that you can't check out an older version of yourself from CVS if things go wrong.
Offtopic. Doesn't that phrase sound strange when you apply it to a person, yet sounds quite correct when applied to software? You'd actually be checking out a younger version of yourself, not an older one. For some reason we measure the "age" of software backwards from today while we measure the age of a living thing forwards from its birth. Yet software is a living thing, in a way, constantly growing and maturing. Would it not make sense to say that we check out a younger version of software from CVS? We still celebrate software anniversaries and say that Linux is X years old, for instance.
He's feeling better at this point, what exactly is the ER going to do for him?
ER tech: "Hello, what's your emergency?" Pat: "Well, I've been feeling kind of icky the last few years, with some pain here and there..." ER tech: "Uhhh... take two of these and call me in the morning. And stay out of the way, we've got people with real problems to treat."
Didn't (R)ead (T)he (F)riendly (A)rticle, did you? He's been to the ER of several different hospitals maybe a dozen times or more in the last couple of years. ERs are for compound fractures, bullet wounds, heart attacks or multiple lacerations. Overt, obvious stuff. If they can't find anything "wrong", they give you some antibiotics and/or pain medication and tell you to go home and sleep it off. That's what they're there for, to deal with general emergencies.
I doubt even the ERs at the largest hospitals will have people knowledgeable enough to diagnose something like this properly and send him to the specialist he needs to see. I would hope they do, but I'm a realist so I doubt it. Can they pull a piece of my windshield out of my left ventricle and patch the hole? There's a good possibility. Can they treat this disease? So far, the ERs and doctors at several hospitals have failed to even identify it. Scary, but typical. I'm not knocking ERs in general. What they do, they do well, and 99 out of 100 ER patients will thank them for that.
Pat needs a specialist that knows about this specific disease, or better yet knows how to quickly figure out which specific disease he has, because right now it sounds like he and his doctor are still just guessing based on symptoms. They haven't run the types of tests that can tell you exactly what you're dealing with. They could still be treating for the wrong bacterium or doing something else that could make his time run out, literally.
What the/. community needs to be doing is exactly this: identify the best and closest specialists in this medical area who have the best chance of identifying this disease quickly and correctly, and help Pat figure out how to get through the usual barriers that typically keep you from seeing the right specialist the first, second, third and twenty-third times you go to the ER with something weird like this. If I read his missive correctly, this is pretty much what he's asking for, a specialist who can give him the proper intensive treatment. Right now he thinks he knows what that entails, which is massive injections of penicillin, but I'm sure if he got to a real specialist and the specialist said something different, he would listen.
Just going to the ER, that's not going to help. He's not actually dying right now, he's feeling better (he says). Until he does actually have an attack of some sort the ER people will have no clue what to do. Help him figure out how to get past the ER and who to connect with--as quickly as possible--to get this thing cured, whatever it is. As others have said, Friday could easily be too late. Knock on wood.
Problem is that I have heard (read?) that flossing can actually help cause an infection like this by allowing the bacteria in question to get into the bloodstream more easily through the cuts in the gums that occur when you floss like you're supposed to. Also any hard brushing that causes the gums to bleed. Can anyone confirm or deny this?
The current mandatory hours are 9am to 10pm -- seven days a week -- with the occasional Saturday evening off for good behavior (at 6:30pm). This averages out to an eighty-five hour work week.
And the kicker: for the honor of this treatment EA salaried employees receive a) no overtime; b) no compensation time! ('comp' time is the equalization of time off for overtime -- any hours spent during a crunch accrue into days off after the product has shipped); c) no additional sick or vacation leave. The time just goes away. Additionally, EA recently announced that, although in the past they have offered essentially a type of comp time in the form of a few weeks off at the end of a project, they no longer wish to do this, and employees shouldn't expect it. Further, since the production of various games is scattered, there was a concern on the part of the employees that developers would leave one crunch only to join another. EA's response was that they would attempt to minimize this, but would make no guarantees. This is unthinkable; they are pushing the team to individual physical health limits, and literally giving them nothing for it.
Why would any human being in their right mind put up with any of those things for more than a week? Are their families starving to death? Are there no other jobs within a 5,000 mile radius of where they live? Are they all hooked on a drug that can only be obtained from the company they work for? Are they all insane? Brainwashed?
It boggles my mind that people have allowed this to even become an issue. No overtime? No comp time? No gaurantee of any time off after a deadline is met? This is total bullshit. In a way, the people that are putting up with this treatment deserve it. How about shutting up and standing up for your humanity in the first place. We aren't in a depression and we aren't in the Middle Ages. Yeah, the law should do something about the exploitation, but the workforce has a responsibility to stand up for itself. If they did so we wouldn't need a class action lawsuit. I simply cannot believe what I have read here today, that even one single person is willing to put up with being treated like slaves or work animals. Fuck, most people treat their work animals better than that!
I've been a long time IE user. Personally I've never had the problems with IE that others have had because I sat down and learned how to setup and use IE from the start. I memorized the operation of every last setting under the Tools->Internet Options dialog and adjusted them accordingly. I learned how to browse as securely as possible while watching what IE does very closely. Of course I'm not your average browser. Almost every setting I could find is set to prompt me, as I enjoy absolute control over things. This also alerts me to how complex some websites are in their attempt to invade your privacy. Just watching all the dialogs pop up for scripting and ActiveX is amazing. Also the hitbox'es, doubleclicks, and adtechs are really annoying.
Yesterday I downloaded and installed FireFox 1.0. I wanted to look at it and find out if it would suit me better since I still consider IE to be a little too proprietary in that it hides what it really does. So I am looking for something a bit more open.
After looking at all the features of FireFox I was amazed at how few things it allowed me to adjust. It doesn't have any of the options I am used to using under IE.
Let's see, you use one piece of software for several years, tweak it up the wazoo just to have a semi-secure browser, then you download another piece of software yesterday and after one single stinking day of attempting to make this new software conform to the behavior patterns you've been habitualized to by the older software, you give up on it? Give me a break. Give yourself a break. Break away from IE for more than an hour and look a bit more deeply into Firefox. It is not an Internet Explorer clone, so don't try to look at it from that perspective or you will miss all the good things staring you in the face. You took the time to learn to use IE properly, now take some time to learn to use Firefox properly.
First thing, Firefox has been designed as a browser for the masses, where they can just download it and run it and get most of the benefits. That's why some things like saving form information are turned on by default. I personally agree that the saving of form passwords should be off, but even when it's turned on it doesn't pose much of a security threat on your average home machine, and I think it still comes up with a dialog asking if you really want to save the password. Anyway, it's really easy to turn that off. Same thing with cookies and other things, there are fine-grained controls in the preferences. You can have it block all cookies or ask for every cookie or have a whitelist/blacklist or some combination of these.
Also look under where it says Enable Javascript, go to the Advanced button and disable most of those options. The only one I ever leave active is the change images option, some shopping websites use that to let you look at different product images by hovering over the thumbnails. There is very little reason to totally disable Javascript because Firefox doesn't use the buggy Microsoft version of Javascript that has always been dangerous to leave on.
If you'd used Firefox more than a day you would have found out about extensions, and found one of the most popular extensions which is Adblock. Install the Adblock extension and then download the latest version of Filterset.G (google or go here). Import the filterset by going to Tools, Adblock, Preferences and clicking on Adblock Options, Import Filters. That will take care of damn near every advertisement (Flash or otherwise) from doubleclick, hitbox, adtech, etc. You simply won't have to deal with them anymore.
There is also a separate Flash blocker extension that will block all Flash animations unless you choose to activate them by clicking on them. Want to block GIF animations? In a new tab, type about:config in the address bar, and then in the filter field that comes up type "ani" and you'll see a config option called imag
I just read on Steve's Digicams news page the other day that Delkin has gotten into the market for gold CD-R media. You can check that out here.
I don't know if they manufacture it themselves or just buy it from MAM-E/MAM-A like some other brands. I also don't know if they're actually any good, so I'd like some opinions on the matter. I've been thinking of getting a stack of 100 for archiving photos.
I'd sure like to see some numbers on what percentage of installed XP desktops have actually updated to SP2. Since I know people who are still running Win95, I don't expect this to be a high number. Don't forget all the corporate systems that are running Win2K and will be for probably another couple of years.
It isn't sensationalist if most of the installed systems in the world are vulnerable.
You shouldn't need to keep restarting the application. Have you tried compacting your folders? You can compact a single folder by right-clicking on the folder and choosing "Compact this folder" or you can compact all folders from the File menu. I think part of what that does in IMAP accounts is clear out messages from the server that have been marked as deleted.
You also may want to take a closer look at the deletion options in the preferences. You can have things delete immediately, but I've found that sometimes it's still necessary to compact folders to really get the server to purge the messages. Give it a try.
Oh, and grab Thunderbird 0.9 if you haven't already. It just came out a few days ago.
Overwriting EEPROM or flash firmware on hardware can be dangerous, as a failure could prevent the hardware from being recognized to try again.
OK, I've never understood this. Why is there no hardware that includes a separate read-only ROM (yes, I know that's redundant) with a backup copy of the original flash ROM, so that it wouldn't be so dangerous to upgrade your computer/card/printer/digital camera? Would this not be a sensible solution to avoid turning all these devices into paperweights during failed firmware upgrades? Sending things back to the manufacturer gets expensive both for the consumer and the manufacturer. Would it not make sense to have a redundant firmware system?
That "Windows may have more virii because it is more popular" myth is bunk.
If you check netcraft, you'll see that currently Apache is more popular a webserver than IIS. So, shouldn't Apache have more vulnerabilites issues that IIS?
I'm all about supporting and open source and stuff, but could we please find at least one example for this argument other than Apache/Netcraft? Because that's basically the ONLY example I've seen for the last year or so. Surely there are a couple of other open source projects that are in wide use in comparison to their Microsoft counterparts, with a similar non-problem with viruses. Using a single project out of the tens of thousands of open source applications is not a statistically significant argument. Just because Apache is more secure than IIS does not prove that Linux is more secure than Windows and so on and so forth. We need to bolster this argument with more examples. Right now ALL we are proving is that Apache is more secure than IIS.
Oh, and by the way, I defy you to actually buy that system for that price from that company. Dell appears to be a master of bait-and-switch advertising, and don't count rebates as part of the total price because you very likely will never get it. There is no such thing as a $599 computer with a 15" LCD monitor included at no cost. Not from that company, anyway.
That's why I said in my post, "everything would be free to download, for people in that country, and for people in any other country with similarly lax copyright laws". Like Canada and the Netherlands.
The several hours to install all that stuff included a lot of time wandering away from the computer while it took forever to do who knows what and download various updates (and sit like a brick waiting for user input). 25MB of updates just for the preinstalled Norton software and it made me reboot no less than six (6) times during that process, so every time you go back to the computer it's sitting there like a lump waiting for you to click "reboot". Just because you aren't around doesn't make the time go any faster. It usually makes the whole process slower since you aren't there to click every unnecessary dialog that pops up.
The time also included Spybot S&D, Adaware, Spyware Blaster, Norton's firewall, and configuration of the various options in each application to make them actually do what they needed to do without user intervention, which the owners were not capable of. Plus configuration of three different desktops for the people who would be using the computer, so they can keep all their files and settings separate. The 3-5 minute login/logout/reboot processes must have ended up adding an hour or more to my time. After the RAM upgrade it logs in/out in like 20-30 seconds. Still slower than a Mac at less than one quarter the "speed".
Instant on? Any fool knows desktop computers aren't instant on. No need to be facetious or sarcastic. But when someone buys a brand new 2.8GHz computer with 256MB RAM and it boots up and switches between users slower than an old 333MHz with 32MB I have at home, I find it upsetting and ridiculous. A 2.8GHz computer should be fast, especially when it's not running anything. The extra 512 made a lot of the problem go away, but it shouldn't have been necessary, and it added to the base cost of the computer. Before the RAM upgrade it was not "perfectly usable", it was dog slow, like their 5-year-old PC which runs Win98 and is basically dying. For further comparison I've also seen an ancient 350MHz iMac running Mac OS X and it is perfectly usable and was even before we upgraded its memory. Booting up and logging in and out are all reasonably quick, and that computer was new in 1999.
Remember what they say about assumptions. I said "we" there because "we" as a group decided that she should invest another $100 with Crucial.com and get another 512MB stick of RAM. It turned out to be a good decision, since it made the computer "perfectly usable". Before that it was not "ok", which was the whole point. It was so slow it made me and the owners think that a lot of cash had just been wasted on a piece of junk.
I don't buy PCs. The next computer I do buy will be a Mac. Also, you can almost always get cheaper RAM upgrades from someplace like Crucial.com rather than buying from the OEM. Yes, you can even get RAM upgrades for Macs there, you don't have to buy everything from Apple.
Then use Linux. I wasn't talking about 'the total cost of ownership', just the initial cost of purchasing one from Dell and Gateway vs. other PC manufactures.
I was just making a comment that I didn't think base cost was the whole story. It wasn't aimed directly at you, but at anyone who might read it as they browse the comments attached to this story. I raised a separate issue for consideration by others. Ask yourself if it was really necessary to respond by talking to me like I'm an idiot.
You may also want to read that link about Dell's customer service that you gave me, funny thing is I see a lot of hardware problems being discussed. Hard drives dying after a week, things like that.
Sure, everything would be free to download, for people in that country, and for people in any other country with similarly lax copyright laws. While people in other countries would also be able to get to the files and download them, those people would be violating the copyright laws of their own country.
As in this case, the copyright holders have no right to sue you, because you aren't breaking any laws in your own country, and you also aren't actively violating any laws in their country. The offense is not yours, it is on the part of the people doing the downloading.
Just because technology is allowing people in some other country to break their own laws, that's not your problem. This is just the typical American hubris, thinking they (we) have the right to tell people in some other country what to do.
I know someone who just bought a Dell with a similar configuration. A little faster processor, actually, 2.8GHz. It was not what I would call "perfectly capable", until we dropped another $100 to upgrade the memory from 256MB to 768MB. WinXP is so advanced it was taking 3-5 minutes to log in and out and reboot. Oh, and then there was the several hours spent installing SP2, post-SP2 critical updates, updating the anti-virus software and configuring the firewall and other safety checks to try and keep the non-computer-oriented family owners safe from the Internet. If I gave this person a bill rather than bartering for fresh fish, they would owe me twice the actual cost of the computer, including the memory upgrade.
I don't know about anyone else, but to me the initial price of the computer is just not the whole story anymore. The secondary costs of running Windows are way too high these days for non-technical people. And haven't you read all the horror stories of cheapo Dell computers dying left and right? How could they possibly keep quality at an acceptable level at that price? That's why I point most people to an entirely different place for choosing a new family or personal computer. They can't compete on the initial price point, but 4 years down the line you will still have a usable computer with amazing capabilities.
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I'm not a programmer, but yes it is my understanding that sandboxing only applies to running a Java applet in a web browser or something similar.
;)
Most Mac users aren't plagued by viruses, trojans or spyware simply because there isn't much of that stuff around for the Mac platform. This is for several reasons. One is that Macs still only represent about 5% of the computing world. Another is that Mac OS X has a better security structure and default security settings than the dominant OS. Another reason is that many Mac users are the type of people who simply don't put up with installing crap on their computer, and see no reason to install useless free junk. Mac users typically want to actually use the computer to get something done. It already looks pretty, why mess with that?
If your physics professors are the only people using their computers, they must not be staying on legitimate physics and news websites. Something must be out of the ordinary for them to be contracting spyware. To get spyware you have to download some software, either manually or through a bug in the browser. Your typical website catering to educators isn't going to allow that sort of automatically installing code on their website. These professors of yours must be straying off the reservation at some point, or getting it through email attachments, or quite possibly a worm.
Firefox could possibly help them if you start with a clean system, but if they are actually going out and downloading FREE ANIMATED MOUSE CURSORS!!! they will need some re-education on how to keep their computer safe. Mac + Firefox would be a vast improvement, but unless they were restricted from installing any software (yes, this can be done) they will eventually get themselves in trouble. For general web browsing it is definitely a much more secure environment, but only if you know not to do something stupid. Java is certainly more secure when using Firefox on either platform, since you aren't using the buggy MSJava implementation.
Don't stop at replacing IE with Firefox. Outlook/Outlook Express is just as bad. Apple Mail is very nice on the Mac, but Thunderbird also works, and of course is cross-platform. And none of this is going to be very effective on Windows if you don't have a solid firewall to go along with it, and anti-virus software. On the Mac, turn on the built-in firewall to increase the already decent security.
The general public is composed of people who literally can't tell the difference between Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Acrobat Reader, or Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. This is no hyperbole, I know many people with this problem and I'm sure you've met some yourself. They'll call and say, "I'm having a problem with my Adobe." Or ask you repeatedly which application you're in right now when you're both looking at the screen, even though the applications present completely different interfaces. The person usually will have been using the applications in question for months or years, and still can't tell them apart without thinking about it really hard.
Is it simple ignorance? No, that could be easily corrected. Is it sheer stupidity? No, these people are otherwise of average intelligence or better. It's some kind of weird mental blindness that comes over people whenever they are faced with a computer screen. It's conditional stupidity, and it's one of the main problems with the general public. Most of them will never learn to be careful until you hook up a car battery to their earlobes that gives them a physical notice whenever they do something stupid. Otherwise they just don't seem to be equipped mentally to grasp the concepts involved in using a computer responsibly. The software industry hasn't exactly been helping matters, but they have a monumental task ahead of them. I think computers are just too abstract for a lot of homo sapiens sapiens to deal with.
Mac OS X is wonderful, but it is not a panacaea. There isn't really any commercial spyware that I know of, but that's mostly because it's an extremely small market that doesn't justify the development time for spyware. There isn't anything technically stopping a Mac user from installing software that will send out information over the network to a third party. Most software installations require an administrator password, which is a good thing, but there are ways around that, like not using an installer and just unzipping the application onto your desktop.
There are already a couple of trojans in existence for OS X, although if you are up to date I think at least one of them no longer works. No operating system is really protected from trojans, unless you get something ultra-secure like OpenBSD and lock it down so tight that it can't be used except for a few specific tasks. Java's sandboxing may keep a Java applet on a random web page from attacking you and installing software, but if you download a separate Java application there's no reason it can't be spyware or contain some sort of trojan. Anyway, why would trojans or spyware need to be written in Java?
So no, Mac + Firefox != OK. It's a hell of a lot better than Win + IE = "pwned in 60 seconds", but you better be on your toes nevertheless. Don't open random email attachments or download kooky software off IRC. There is nothing inherently protecting Macs/Linux/*BSD or any other operating system from all possible threats. That's just not the way it works. It just has a higher default level of security than some other things we know.
Your best security on any platform is incremental backups with an offsite copy.
Ahem... Why are you pretending all /.ers are as bad as each other?
/.ers do find it reasonable for spyware like yours to exist in the world, as long as it notifies the user clearly that they are selling personal information in exchange for the "free" use of this software. On the other hand even those folks will usually still class your software in the same category of the junk that unknowingly violates your privacy and bogs down your computer.
On the one hand, some
It's difficult for most people to come to the conclusion that there is such a thing as "good spyware" a.k.a. "direct advertising software", just because there are idiots in the world ready to willingly give up their rights to information privacy for money or free junk software goodies. In the end, users like that and software like yours simply chip away at our ability to keep our personal information private. Therefore all spyware is considered somewhat of a menace whether they are "legitimate" or not.
On the gripping hand, of course, if your software were really totally honest and straightforward about what it does, it wouldn't really fit the definition of "spyware", now would it? I don't know of any such software, but I will concede that it could exist. Personally I would still disapprove of it, but people have to make their own decisions about giving up their personal information.
The general public would probably give up lots of other rights in exchange for free stuff. That usually doesn't make it OK for them to do so, nor does it make it OK for someone to try to get them to do so. Even if it happens to be legal.
There seem to be a lot of people who still don't understand that LCDs don't really have a "refresh rate" like CRTs do. A CRT screen refreshes every single pixel on the screen 60 (or 75/85/90/100/120) times every second. That's why many of us can actually see the whole screen flickering with slower refresh rates. LCDs don't flicker no matter what refresh rate you tell the graphics card to use, because they don't refresh every pixel on the screen at the same time, thus no flicker. They only change the pixels that need to be changed.
The important refresh rate for LCDs is what I think they call the pixel response rate, or the speed at which each individual pixel can be changed. A slow pixel response rate is what gives you things like trails from moving objects around on the screen. The ghost image doesn't get wiped off the screen fast enough because the pixels can't be changed that fast. Well, your average modern desktop LCD has a pixel response rate less than 20 milliseconds, some are even lower. That means that mouse trails and ghost images are mostly a thing of the past. It just doesn't happen anymore. I don't even see any reason for current LCDs being bad for gaming. I watch DVDs fullscreen on my laptop all the time with no difficulty, and it is already a few years old. I'm sure the newer/better LCDs can handle Unreal and Half-Life and their brethren just fine.
By the way, to the parent poster, I'm not sure who I'm responding to. Try putting quoted text in italics and/or use a blockquote tag to separate it from your own text.
Just FYI, in case you ever go ocean trekking, you actually can buy a hand-operated desalination pump for your survival raft to make fresh water from saltwater. It's considerably more difficult than removing particulates, chemicals and bacteria from fresh water. I can't find a link to where you can actually order one, but I wouldn't be surprised if a desalination pump cost several hundred or even a couple grand. Requires some sort of reverse osmosis, I think.
I work for an organization that does marine safety training, and my boss related to me a story about a couple who survived something like 68 days in a liferaft in the middle of the ocean with nothing but a little food and a hand-operated desalinator. Not sure of the date but it was some years ago, so they've been around for a while.
I think I read about that in an article on CSI:Miami. It's just color psychology. Most people don't consciously notice the color cast, they just think the reddish place is getting more direct sunlight and is thus hotter (Miami) and the bluish place is getting more overcast/shade type light, thus colder weather (New York). It gives each show a different "feel". Same thing happens in the photography field. Look up color balance, color psychology and white balance.
You probably don't realize it but a lot of the commercial images and things you see on TV are passed through a slightly reddish filter or white balanced on a slightly blue object (thus subtracting blue, the same as adding red) to "warm them up". It makes skin tones look more vibrant and everything looks more inviting and appealing, psychologically speaking. That's why things on TV often look more "real" than the everyday things you see around you. Apparently the general public doesn't like the drabness of color accurate reality.
Four pills is a little short of six months of 24/7 IV drip antibiotic treatments. What you're talking about is an order of magnitude smaller than what the guy alledgedly needs to survive this. Probably something a mere dentist is not qualified to prescribe. At least, one would hope that a dentist isn't allowed to prescribe that level of medication on his own.
Treatment. He said treatment. That's like a program, not a substance. As in, something that is normally administered by a qualified physician. He said "high-dose antibiotic treatment" because at this point in time according to what little information he has about this disease he believes that is the one and only treatment that will actually help him. He isn't an idiot, so I am willing to bet that if he were to actually see a specialist and the specialist prescribed a different treatment, he would listen. But he hasn't seen a specialist yet, and as of the writing of the letter he won't have access to one until Friday.
I don't know if you're usually an idiot, but today you are being both an idiot and an ignorant, insensitive jackass.
BTW, antibiotics have no similarity to narcotics, hallucinogens or pain killers. They don't give you a "high" or anything like that. This makes your assertion doubly ridiculous. Next time you feel like "cutting to the chase", do yourself and all of us a favor. Don't.
Have you A) called the phone number(s) listed in the letter, or B) emailed this information including your cousin's contact info to the email address he listed in the letter, with "[HELP]" as part of the subject line, as he specified?
If not, please think about doing so.
Remember that you can't check out an older version of yourself from CVS if things go wrong.
Offtopic. Doesn't that phrase sound strange when you apply it to a person, yet sounds quite correct when applied to software? You'd actually be checking out a younger version of yourself, not an older one. For some reason we measure the "age" of software backwards from today while we measure the age of a living thing forwards from its birth. Yet software is a living thing, in a way, constantly growing and maturing. Would it not make sense to say that we check out a younger version of software from CVS? We still celebrate software anniversaries and say that Linux is X years old, for instance.
English is odd, sometimes.
He's feeling better at this point, what exactly is the ER going to do for him?
/. community needs to be doing is exactly this: identify the best and closest specialists in this medical area who have the best chance of identifying this disease quickly and correctly, and help Pat figure out how to get through the usual barriers that typically keep you from seeing the right specialist the first, second, third and twenty-third times you go to the ER with something weird like this. If I read his missive correctly, this is pretty much what he's asking for, a specialist who can give him the proper intensive treatment. Right now he thinks he knows what that entails, which is massive injections of penicillin, but I'm sure if he got to a real specialist and the specialist said something different, he would listen.
ER tech: "Hello, what's your emergency?"
Pat: "Well, I've been feeling kind of icky the last few years, with some pain here and there..."
ER tech: "Uhhh... take two of these and call me in the morning. And stay out of the way, we've got people with real problems to treat."
Didn't (R)ead (T)he (F)riendly (A)rticle, did you? He's been to the ER of several different hospitals maybe a dozen times or more in the last couple of years. ERs are for compound fractures, bullet wounds, heart attacks or multiple lacerations. Overt, obvious stuff. If they can't find anything "wrong", they give you some antibiotics and/or pain medication and tell you to go home and sleep it off. That's what they're there for, to deal with general emergencies.
I doubt even the ERs at the largest hospitals will have people knowledgeable enough to diagnose something like this properly and send him to the specialist he needs to see. I would hope they do, but I'm a realist so I doubt it. Can they pull a piece of my windshield out of my left ventricle and patch the hole? There's a good possibility. Can they treat this disease? So far, the ERs and doctors at several hospitals have failed to even identify it. Scary, but typical. I'm not knocking ERs in general. What they do, they do well, and 99 out of 100 ER patients will thank them for that.
Pat needs a specialist that knows about this specific disease, or better yet knows how to quickly figure out which specific disease he has, because right now it sounds like he and his doctor are still just guessing based on symptoms. They haven't run the types of tests that can tell you exactly what you're dealing with. They could still be treating for the wrong bacterium or doing something else that could make his time run out, literally.
What the
Just going to the ER, that's not going to help. He's not actually dying right now, he's feeling better (he says). Until he does actually have an attack of some sort the ER people will have no clue what to do. Help him figure out how to get past the ER and who to connect with--as quickly as possible--to get this thing cured, whatever it is. As others have said, Friday could easily be too late. Knock on wood.
Problem is that I have heard (read?) that flossing can actually help cause an infection like this by allowing the bacteria in question to get into the bloodstream more easily through the cuts in the gums that occur when you floss like you're supposed to. Also any hard brushing that causes the gums to bleed. Can anyone confirm or deny this?
Why would any human being in their right mind put up with any of those things for more than a week? Are their families starving to death? Are there no other jobs within a 5,000 mile radius of where they live? Are they all hooked on a drug that can only be obtained from the company they work for? Are they all insane? Brainwashed?
It boggles my mind that people have allowed this to even become an issue. No overtime? No comp time? No gaurantee of any time off after a deadline is met? This is total bullshit. In a way, the people that are putting up with this treatment deserve it. How about shutting up and standing up for your humanity in the first place. We aren't in a depression and we aren't in the Middle Ages. Yeah, the law should do something about the exploitation, but the workforce has a responsibility to stand up for itself. If they did so we wouldn't need a class action lawsuit. I simply cannot believe what I have read here today, that even one single person is willing to put up with being treated like slaves or work animals. Fuck, most people treat their work animals better than that!
WHY ARE YOU PUTTING UP WITH IT?! WHY?!?
Let's see, you use one piece of software for several years, tweak it up the wazoo just to have a semi-secure browser, then you download another piece of software yesterday and after one single stinking day of attempting to make this new software conform to the behavior patterns you've been habitualized to by the older software, you give up on it? Give me a break. Give yourself a break. Break away from IE for more than an hour and look a bit more deeply into Firefox. It is not an Internet Explorer clone, so don't try to look at it from that perspective or you will miss all the good things staring you in the face. You took the time to learn to use IE properly, now take some time to learn to use Firefox properly.
First thing, Firefox has been designed as a browser for the masses, where they can just download it and run it and get most of the benefits. That's why some things like saving form information are turned on by default. I personally agree that the saving of form passwords should be off, but even when it's turned on it doesn't pose much of a security threat on your average home machine, and I think it still comes up with a dialog asking if you really want to save the password. Anyway, it's really easy to turn that off. Same thing with cookies and other things, there are fine-grained controls in the preferences. You can have it block all cookies or ask for every cookie or have a whitelist/blacklist or some combination of these.
Also look under where it says Enable Javascript, go to the Advanced button and disable most of those options. The only one I ever leave active is the change images option, some shopping websites use that to let you look at different product images by hovering over the thumbnails. There is very little reason to totally disable Javascript because Firefox doesn't use the buggy Microsoft version of Javascript that has always been dangerous to leave on.
If you'd used Firefox more than a day you would have found out about extensions, and found one of the most popular extensions which is Adblock. Install the Adblock extension and then download the latest version of Filterset.G (google or go here). Import the filterset by going to Tools, Adblock, Preferences and clicking on Adblock Options, Import Filters. That will take care of damn near every advertisement (Flash or otherwise) from doubleclick, hitbox, adtech, etc. You simply won't have to deal with them anymore.
There is also a separate Flash blocker extension that will block all Flash animations unless you choose to activate them by clicking on them. Want to block GIF animations? In a new tab, type about:config in the address bar, and then in the filter field that comes up type "ani" and you'll see a config option called imag
I just read on Steve's Digicams news page the other day that Delkin has gotten into the market for gold CD-R media. You can check that out here.
I don't know if they manufacture it themselves or just buy it from MAM-E/MAM-A like some other brands. I also don't know if they're actually any good, so I'd like some opinions on the matter. I've been thinking of getting a stack of 100 for archiving photos.
I'd sure like to see some numbers on what percentage of installed XP desktops have actually updated to SP2. Since I know people who are still running Win95, I don't expect this to be a high number. Don't forget all the corporate systems that are running Win2K and will be for probably another couple of years.
It isn't sensationalist if most of the installed systems in the world are vulnerable.
You shouldn't need to keep restarting the application. Have you tried compacting your folders? You can compact a single folder by right-clicking on the folder and choosing "Compact this folder" or you can compact all folders from the File menu. I think part of what that does in IMAP accounts is clear out messages from the server that have been marked as deleted.
You also may want to take a closer look at the deletion options in the preferences. You can have things delete immediately, but I've found that sometimes it's still necessary to compact folders to really get the server to purge the messages. Give it a try.
Oh, and grab Thunderbird 0.9 if you haven't already. It just came out a few days ago.
Overwriting EEPROM or flash firmware on hardware can be dangerous, as a failure could prevent the hardware from being recognized to try again.
OK, I've never understood this. Why is there no hardware that includes a separate read-only ROM (yes, I know that's redundant) with a backup copy of the original flash ROM, so that it wouldn't be so dangerous to upgrade your computer/card/printer/digital camera? Would this not be a sensible solution to avoid turning all these devices into paperweights during failed firmware upgrades? Sending things back to the manufacturer gets expensive both for the consumer and the manufacturer. Would it not make sense to have a redundant firmware system?
That "Windows may have more virii because it is more popular" myth is bunk.
If you check netcraft, you'll see that currently Apache is more popular a webserver than IIS. So, shouldn't Apache have more vulnerabilites issues that IIS?
I'm all about supporting and open source and stuff, but could we please find at least one example for this argument other than Apache/Netcraft? Because that's basically the ONLY example I've seen for the last year or so. Surely there are a couple of other open source projects that are in wide use in comparison to their Microsoft counterparts, with a similar non-problem with viruses. Using a single project out of the tens of thousands of open source applications is not a statistically significant argument. Just because Apache is more secure than IIS does not prove that Linux is more secure than Windows and so on and so forth. We need to bolster this argument with more examples. Right now ALL we are proving is that Apache is more secure than IIS.
Oh, and by the way, I defy you to actually buy that system for that price from that company. Dell appears to be a master of bait-and-switch advertising, and don't count rebates as part of the total price because you very likely will never get it. There is no such thing as a $599 computer with a 15" LCD monitor included at no cost. Not from that company, anyway.
That's why I said in my post, "everything would be free to download, for people in that country, and for people in any other country with similarly lax copyright laws". Like Canada and the Netherlands.
Yeah, my other computer is Linux too. So what?
The several hours to install all that stuff included a lot of time wandering away from the computer while it took forever to do who knows what and download various updates (and sit like a brick waiting for user input). 25MB of updates just for the preinstalled Norton software and it made me reboot no less than six (6) times during that process, so every time you go back to the computer it's sitting there like a lump waiting for you to click "reboot". Just because you aren't around doesn't make the time go any faster. It usually makes the whole process slower since you aren't there to click every unnecessary dialog that pops up.
The time also included Spybot S&D, Adaware, Spyware Blaster, Norton's firewall, and configuration of the various options in each application to make them actually do what they needed to do without user intervention, which the owners were not capable of. Plus configuration of three different desktops for the people who would be using the computer, so they can keep all their files and settings separate. The 3-5 minute login/logout/reboot processes must have ended up adding an hour or more to my time. After the RAM upgrade it logs in/out in like 20-30 seconds. Still slower than a Mac at less than one quarter the "speed".
Instant on? Any fool knows desktop computers aren't instant on. No need to be facetious or sarcastic. But when someone buys a brand new 2.8GHz computer with 256MB RAM and it boots up and switches between users slower than an old 333MHz with 32MB I have at home, I find it upsetting and ridiculous. A 2.8GHz computer should be fast, especially when it's not running anything. The extra 512 made a lot of the problem go away, but it shouldn't have been necessary, and it added to the base cost of the computer. Before the RAM upgrade it was not "perfectly usable", it was dog slow, like their 5-year-old PC which runs Win98 and is basically dying. For further comparison I've also seen an ancient 350MHz iMac running Mac OS X and it is perfectly usable and was even before we upgraded its memory. Booting up and logging in and out are all reasonably quick, and that computer was new in 1999.
Remember what they say about assumptions. I said "we" there because "we" as a group decided that she should invest another $100 with Crucial.com and get another 512MB stick of RAM. It turned out to be a good decision, since it made the computer "perfectly usable". Before that it was not "ok", which was the whole point. It was so slow it made me and the owners think that a lot of cash had just been wasted on a piece of junk.
I don't buy PCs. The next computer I do buy will be a Mac. Also, you can almost always get cheaper RAM upgrades from someplace like Crucial.com rather than buying from the OEM. Yes, you can even get RAM upgrades for Macs there, you don't have to buy everything from Apple.
Then use Linux. I wasn't talking about 'the total cost of ownership', just the initial cost of purchasing one from Dell and Gateway vs. other PC manufactures.
I was just making a comment that I didn't think base cost was the whole story. It wasn't aimed directly at you, but at anyone who might read it as they browse the comments attached to this story. I raised a separate issue for consideration by others. Ask yourself if it was really necessary to respond by talking to me like I'm an idiot.
You may also want to read that link about Dell's customer service that you gave me, funny thing is I see a lot of hardware problems being discussed. Hard drives dying after a week, things like that.
Sure, everything would be free to download, for people in that country, and for people in any other country with similarly lax copyright laws. While people in other countries would also be able to get to the files and download them, those people would be violating the copyright laws of their own country.
As in this case, the copyright holders have no right to sue you, because you aren't breaking any laws in your own country, and you also aren't actively violating any laws in their country. The offense is not yours, it is on the part of the people doing the downloading.
Just because technology is allowing people in some other country to break their own laws, that's not your problem. This is just the typical American hubris, thinking they (we) have the right to tell people in some other country what to do.
I know someone who just bought a Dell with a similar configuration. A little faster processor, actually, 2.8GHz. It was not what I would call "perfectly capable", until we dropped another $100 to upgrade the memory from 256MB to 768MB. WinXP is so advanced it was taking 3-5 minutes to log in and out and reboot. Oh, and then there was the several hours spent installing SP2, post-SP2 critical updates, updating the anti-virus software and configuring the firewall and other safety checks to try and keep the non-computer-oriented family owners safe from the Internet. If I gave this person a bill rather than bartering for fresh fish, they would owe me twice the actual cost of the computer, including the memory upgrade.
I don't know about anyone else, but to me the initial price of the computer is just not the whole story anymore. The secondary costs of running Windows are way too high these days for non-technical people. And haven't you read all the horror stories of cheapo Dell computers dying left and right? How could they possibly keep quality at an acceptable level at that price? That's why I point most people to an entirely different place for choosing a new family or personal computer. They can't compete on the initial price point, but 4 years down the line you will still have a usable computer with amazing capabilities.