Sooo, if I read you and everyone else like you correctly, the proper response for someone raping *you* in prison, would be to have a virus writer mess with *his* network. All things being equal. That sound good? We'll call you guys even when his network has been down for about three days.
I'm sure that will put a smile on your face and joy in your heart.
You mean like the minimum security prison that Kevin Mitnick was supposed to go to?
Hackers aren't treated like accountants, my friend. They are treated like witches/warlocks. We're lucky they don't allow burning people at the stake anymore. Wake up.
he himself, having already victimized others, will have little moral grounds on which to erect a legitimate complaint.
I'm sure glad our legal system doesn't operate according to your individual definition of morality. Then again, it might as well, seeing how much is done about illegal prisoner rape when it's reported. What I especially enjoy is when the warden and/or guards, who have your wonderful outlook on things, stick the rapee who complains *back* into the cell with the original rapist, or a new one, so it can happen again. That keeps the complaint rate nice and low.
And what if the guy wrote some experimental code that just happened to do something bad, and someone else took it and released it? You sound like one of those people who would still want the writer to go to prison, because writing "bad" code is "immoral", and immoral==illegal.
If it's A-OK to rape this person, is it also OK to shoot him, for his immoral crimes against humanity? Is it OK to castrate him? How about we gouge out his eyes? Would that satisfy your sense of morality?
People like you scare the living crap out of me. But I'm glad I live in a country where you have just as much protection under the law as I do, and vice versa. I hope some day you will appreciate it as much as I do. Have a nice day.
I was replying not directly to the original poster but to the HANDFUL of his respondents who were all spewing the same stupid rape joke and were ALL getting +5, Funny. That just took me over the edge, that joking about his little white ass no longer being a virgin seemed to be a guarantee of excellent karma from the moderators.
Oh, and the vast majority of violent criminals in our prison system seem to be black males, who are often large. The small ones are watching out for their own asses. Thus if you are to be raped in prison, it is quite likely that it will be one or more large black men who will be doing the raping. Who is it that everyone jokes about? That's right, Bubba, the large black man. A stereotype, yes, but most stereotypes do have some basis in fact. Nothing racist about it, just statistics. Everyone else seems to think the Bubba joke is damned funny, for some reason.
A "well disguised troll". I like that. That means a troll that says something worthwhile but says it in a way you don't like? Thanks, I'll try to keep up the good work.
Ha ha, yes, it is quite amusing to be sent to prison for a nonviolent offense (typing on a keyboard, for instance) and subsequently violently raped repeatedly by multiple large black men while the guards stand by and laugh and the prison wardens make no effort to keep it from happening. We will be sure to laugh heartily when you, your brother, father, son, uncle and/or cousins are sentenced to 30 days for some minor offense which they may or may not have committed. We will chuckle about the fact that they have a very good chance of coming home broken and scarred physically and psychologically by their horrifying experiences. Ha ha ha.
Rape is immoral. Rape is inhuman. Rape is cruel and unusual punishment, and we have laws against that. I always find it entertaining how our entire prison establishment feels these laws are unimportant, and our culture thinks that jokes about young, weak, and sometimes innocent people getting forcibly sodomized is a fabulous thing to joke about. Wait, no, I don't find it entertaining. I find it makes me sick to my stomach.
It's also heartening to see every prison rape joke getting a +5, Funny. Thank you, moderators. Great way to get karma. Keep up the good work.
Yo, RFTP/RTFA. It says in both the article and the post that the witness saw the person "testing" the virus, not writing it. Which is even more scary in a way. How did the witness know what he was doing? What day was it? Which version is he supposed to have written? Oh, and there has been "no arrest made in this matter yet."
The BBC article contains a bit more info: It says he's suspected of altering the original MSBlast worm into one that would cause more damage.
It also says: "Reports suggest he is likely to be arrested by the end of the day." WTF? They're giving him advance warning?!? Run, boy, RUN!!! LOL.
if you had to switch from XP to 98 because the interface confused you and you were lost, then *NO* current or near-future version of Linux will be beneficial to you
I disagree strongly with this statement. I've been quite comfortable with Win98, BeOS, Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, IceWM and KDE at various times, yet WinXP's default interface makes me queasy. Especially that new start menu, and most of the new control panel interfaces. They must have been smoking crack if they thought they were "simplifying" things there. Ick. So I always change the WinXP interface to the classic Win98 interface. And then I happily return to my Linux/KDE desktop. Thus, I don't think you can make a blanket statement that if you were confused by WinXP's interface you'll be confused by any Linux interface. WinXP is very confusing in many ways.
I think the point really is that for some odd reason, people like myself and n1k0 have trouble figuring out how to do all those things in GNOME, yet knowing just as little about KDE, we can wander around the panels and menus and very quickly get something set up to our personal specifications. Something about GNOME just isn't intuitive to us. I couldn't tell you where the difference lies, but it's huge. If generally intelligent technical users are unable to get GNOME set up how they want it, there's something wrong with GNOME.
It's not like we have anything against GNOME. Like n1k0 said, I'd like to like GNOME, I really would. It just doesn't give me what I want, and KDE does, despite possibly being slower than GNOME. Although personally I've never noticed a real difference between the two, speedwise.
Ah, someone beat me to it. I was about to say I thought the whole reason for "May contain peanuts" was so that people could avoid those particular products.
I remember this one episode of Freaks & Geeks where the geek had a peanut allergy and some jackass stuck some peanuts in his sandwich at lunch in the cafeteria. He went down within a matter of seconds from (apparently) a violent swelling of the tissues in his airway, and had to be immediately hospitalized, coming close to death because some idiot wanted to be funny.
Of course it was a dramatization, but if this peanut allergy is really anything like that, I'm sure I would want to stay away from anything with even a molecule of peanut matter in it. It's literally a matter of life and death for some folks.
I think the parent post needs to be modded up so more people see the correct reason for that label. The grandparent post had it backwards, it's not the nuts that are dangerous, it's the peanuts.
So when you cook or bake things with peanuts to feed to the public or people that you don't necessarily know, make sure that they know it contains peanuts. I don't know about the rest of you, but accidentally killing someone would tend to make me feel bad.
The grandparent post may be a troll, but if so it's a troll with a damn good point, and one that most of us probably wouldn't have identified as a troll. I know I found myself reading along with such gems as:
Next it was time for getting the pics off my digital camera. I have a USB Compact Flash reader plugged into the USB port. I stuck the compact flash card in and the harddrive blinked a bit but nothing mounted. After digging around in/proc a bit, I figured out that the USB reader gets mapped to a SCSI device.(emphasis added) A simple:
mount/dev/sdb1/mnt/camera
and VIOLA! Pictures!
I have had to do exactly that, and the same goes for a lot of the other things he talks about. This is where you're average user will be saying, "The proc what?" And I'm using Mandrake 9.1, which most of us I believe would think of as one of the easiest distros to use.
It has to be said, over and over again whenever an article like this comes up: Linux has a loooooong way to go to create a usable desktop in the same sense that a Windows or Mac desktop is usable. Now, pardon me while I return to my MDK9.1 desktop, to watch my movies, surf the web and pull the pictures off my camera by opening Konsole and typing "mount/dev/sdb1/mnt/camera". Once you've figured it out, it's so easy!
Free yourselves from this Microsoft cloning and get something like Fluxbox.
Mmm, yeah. Fluxbox. Yeah. Nowwww, how does that work again? Yeah, because I have no idea. I've tried it a half-dozen times, after seeing people rave about it. I still really have no clue how to use it to do the things I want to do. I just run right back to my easily-configured KDE desktop, which by now doesn't resemble a Windows desktop much anymore.
Same thing with WindowMaker, and GNOME. I keep seeing someone going off the deep end about how either of those is the perfect window manager, so I give them another try. But it's no use. I just don't understand how to fit into their flow, and accomplish the tasks I want to accomplish.
So here's my brilliant idea: All of you window manager advocates really need to make videos, *showing* us how to use the window manager of your choice. How to customize it and configure it. How to switch between windows, desktops and applications. Show us all the wonderful things that make you think Fluxbox, or whatever, is so wonderful. Because without that, most people will never understand.
Just like me. By most indicators I'm a rather intelligent person. I'm the person everyone calls to fix their computer. But I step into WindowMaker and I'm completely and utterly lost. I don't understand how it works, and can't figure it out by fiddling around with it. I've never had this problem with KDE, Windows (from 3.0 to XP), BeOS, Mac OS 9/X, etc. With them, I fiddle around for a while, and I'm ready to go. I don't know why this is. They certainly aren't all the same.
I'm actually serious about this. Screenshots just don't tell the whole story about any distro, desktop environment or window manager. People need to be able to see how they work, not just what they look like. Especially if they work any differently than what they're used to. So I hope to see some videos popping up all over the web.
I was helping out one of my former college professors last year, he needed to set up a lab full of computers with drawing pads for a fine arts camp. It was a small lab, we were given a dozen Dell Latitude wireless laptops running Win2K. I set things up so that the computers could also be used to access the Internet through a router, so the kids and teachers could check e-mail and such during lunch and after classes were over for the day.
By the end of the second or third day, every computer in that room had MSN Messenger installed, plus most of them had other idiotic things like Audio Galaxy, Gator, etc. MSN, IE, MSN.com, Hotmail, that's all I ever saw any of those kids, or the teachers, using. It's like none of them had any idea that there were any alternatives to Microsoft, nor any reason they might want to use anything other than what they had been spoonfed on their computers at home and at school. It was downright scary. The kids were from all over Alaska. I had Mozilla and some other things on a couple of computers and none of them had even heard of it.
I tried to clean up all the adware, spyware and other junk they had all installed, but I'm sure the university that loaned us the laptops ended up having to wipe the drives and put on fresh images. They'd be insane not to.
That procedure looks very involved. Fortunately, for those using Mandrake 9.0/9.1, like myself, all the components have been installed and configured for you already. You can optionally encrypt any partition during the install, including swap partitions, just by checking a box in the advanced options for that partition and entering your 20+ character pass phrase. The only OS I knew about before this that would encrypt swap partitions was OpenBSD.
If you've got somewhere to move your files temporarily, you can also do this to any partition even after you've installed the system. However trying to create an encrypted partition in DiskDrake after you're in an installed system will just create a regular partition. A couple of necessary steps seem to have been left out of the non-install DiskDrake scripts, so you'll have to run the missing commands on the partition yourself to actually create an encrypted filesystem.
I found this out after reading "man losetup", thus ending weeks of irritation about why I couldn't create another encrypted partition in DiskDrake. At the same time I discovered there are options for three different levels of AES encryption, 128, 192, and 256. If you do this during the install process it defaults to using AES128, so by doing this manually you can get much stronger encryption.
So the steps are, basically, to use DiskDrake to set up the partition and mark it encrypted, that will set up the entry in/etc/fstab for you, which is kind of complicated if you try and do it by hand without an example to work from. Then after saving the partition table and leaving DiskDrake, drop to the command line, read "man losetup" and look for the example commands for making a filesystem on a loop device.
Just replace whatever example filename they give in the man page with the name of the partition you just modified, e.g. "/dev/hda6" or whatever, and mkfs the same filesystem on it that you specified in DiskDrake (or you'll have to change that entry in/etc/fstab, no big deal). Voila, in seconds you have a new filesystem with strong encryption. I'd write the actual commands here, there's only like three short commands you need, but I'm not at my Linux box (boo hoo).
I have also read somewhere that you can somehow set up PAM authentication so that encrypted devices are mounted when you log in, but that would seem to mostly defeat the purpose of the strong encryption in the first place, but if you care more about ease-of-use than the security, that's another option to look over.
I'd really like to see some references on the actual strength of the different encryption levels (like, how long would it take to break each level), and how much the encryption affects the I/O speed of the partition. I know it does slow it down a little bit.
I'd also like to know about any GUI mount program that has built-in support for detecting the password prompt and asking the user for the password instead of just failing. Mounting encrypted drives is one of the last things I *have* to descend to the command line to accomplish. (Not that I'm not in there all day anyway, but it's the principle of the thing. Come on KDE! I can do everything else graphically now, why not this?;)
Mensa membership apparently doesn't require you to be smart enough to know that you shouldn't brag about your IQ in a forum with ~ half a million readers.
IQ, a quotient based on a battery of tests on such things as math, reading, logic, and spatial skills, is not the same thing as Social Intelligence. Social Intelligence might also be referred to as "street smarts" or knowing how to deal with people. It's quite possible to have one without even a shred of the other. As most of us geeks know. So yes, Mensa doesn't necessarily require you to have the "smarts" to know not to brag about your IQ, but that doesn't prove the original poster isn't "intelligent" in those other ways. In fact, he could even be a genius.
And now something for our moderators: Who's this SCO character I keep hearing about? Was he the bad guy in "Hackers"?
Read the subject. Everyone who is asking the (dumb) question here, "How can you undercut a free product by giving away something for free?" has failed to realize one thing: Windows is still easier to use than Linux. Period.
If you don't agree with this then you're a real Linux zealot, or you just have no clue how actual non-technical users think and work with computers. Don't feel bad, I've fallen into the same fantasy several times. But every time I set a real user down in front of a Linux machine, I realize yet again that Linux has a long way to go. You cannot, I say again, you CANNOT find a Linux distro to this day that is truly the equivalent to Windows in terms of making your computer easy to work with. (The closest is probably Xandros, with its proprietary file manager.)
I can think of a lot of examples but one of the biggest ones in my mind is the fact that Linux makes it so damn complicated to work with all the different drives attached to your system. In Windows, if you attach an external Firewire or USB storage device, or anything else for that matter, it will first be installed and from then on it will automagically appear in the file manager. I have yet to find the equivalent behaviour in any Linux program or desktop environment.
Oh, and you'd like to eject a disk? Sorry, as long as a single obscure, hidden application or daemon is still messing with that drive, you can't unmount it (a totally foreign concept to most people) and thus you can't eject it. Supermount? I'm sorry, but supermount is still a total pain in the ass. I'm using Mandrake 9.1 and I have once again disabled supermount in favor of regular mount options. It just doesn't work the way a human needs it to work. It doesn't even approach the ease with which you can eject a disk in any Windows environment. Yes, I know it's unsafe, but it's EASY, and that's what non-techies care about.
I could fill a book with other usability problems with Linux and its various desktop environments. It's not just the fact that people have used Windows for years. Windows really is still easier to use in so many ways. That doesn't even bring in the application and device compatibility issues.
Last but not least, non-techies either don't know about, or don't care about, the hole they will be digging themselves into by accepting and using proprietary software to create all their documents, thus practically chaining themselves to the Beast from Redmond. They just don't care. They have actual lives and actual work to do, and they don't feel that any of this is important, if they're even aware of it at all.
All this adds up to exactly why "Free Windows" can definitely undercut "Free Linux". Because it's not just about the numbers on the price tag.
I just use any piece of 8.5 x 11 paper I find to make a sleeve:
As someone mentioned before, regular paper WILL scratch the hell out of the surface of a CD or DVD over time, causing "fogged" spots and making the disc unreadable. This is a really bad idea unless you don't care about your CDs. There are ways to re-treat the surface with things like carnauba wax or Pledge, but you have to use just the right stuff.
A much better solution is sleeves made with smooth plastic and/or non-scratching cloth and/or some other smooth material like those Tyvek sleeves they used to make for 5-1/4 inch floppies. Personally I really like the Case Logic Prosleeves and the pre-made cases.
One place to look at is http://cyberguys.com, they have a good selection of CD case options, even sleeves and racks that you can fit into regular file drawers. I haven't shopped around much but they seemed to have decent prices on most things.
There are other reasons to "fool" a non-technical user into using Mozilla rather than IE, besides the "just because" reason. Like the fact that even in the most up-to-date versions of IE there dozens of possibly horrible exploits where simply navigating to the wrong web page could get your computer taken over, or your hard drive wiped (vis-a-vis the very recent huge hole in Microsoft's proprietary Java VM). Or are we supposed to let the ignorant user "choose" to run every executable e-mail attachment and do other dumb, dangerous things, just for the fun of it?
Second point, how many users do you think are going to be visiting WindowsUpdate when they can't even tell the difference between Mozilla and IE? The mother would be highly unlikely to do such a thing at all, and most certainly not without assistance from the son. So "fooling" this person into using a more secure web browser does no real harm and helps keep her from damaging her computer inadvertently. On top of that, I've seen very few web sites lately that ever say they only support IE. Even if they do, they almost invariably work just fine with Mozilla now.
I can't believe you got modded up for such a knee-jerk, non-thinking whine.
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Sooo, if I read you and everyone else like you correctly, the proper response for someone raping *you* in prison, would be to have a virus writer mess with *his* network. All things being equal. That sound good? We'll call you guys even when his network has been down for about three days.
I'm sure that will put a smile on your face and joy in your heart.
You mean like the minimum security prison that Kevin Mitnick was supposed to go to?
Hackers aren't treated like accountants, my friend. They are treated like witches/warlocks. We're lucky they don't allow burning people at the stake anymore. Wake up.
I'm sure glad our legal system doesn't operate according to your individual definition of morality. Then again, it might as well, seeing how much is done about illegal prisoner rape when it's reported. What I especially enjoy is when the warden and/or guards, who have your wonderful outlook on things, stick the rapee who complains *back* into the cell with the original rapist, or a new one, so it can happen again. That keeps the complaint rate nice and low.
And what if the guy wrote some experimental code that just happened to do something bad, and someone else took it and released it? You sound like one of those people who would still want the writer to go to prison, because writing "bad" code is "immoral", and immoral==illegal.
If it's A-OK to rape this person, is it also OK to shoot him, for his immoral crimes against humanity? Is it OK to castrate him? How about we gouge out his eyes? Would that satisfy your sense of morality?
People like you scare the living crap out of me. But I'm glad I live in a country where you have just as much protection under the law as I do, and vice versa. I hope some day you will appreciate it as much as I do. Have a nice day.
I was replying not directly to the original poster but to the HANDFUL of his respondents who were all spewing the same stupid rape joke and were ALL getting +5, Funny. That just took me over the edge, that joking about his little white ass no longer being a virgin seemed to be a guarantee of excellent karma from the moderators.
Oh, and the vast majority of violent criminals in our prison system seem to be black males, who are often large. The small ones are watching out for their own asses. Thus if you are to be raped in prison, it is quite likely that it will be one or more large black men who will be doing the raping. Who is it that everyone jokes about? That's right, Bubba, the large black man. A stereotype, yes, but most stereotypes do have some basis in fact. Nothing racist about it, just statistics. Everyone else seems to think the Bubba joke is damned funny, for some reason.
A "well disguised troll". I like that. That means a troll that says something worthwhile but says it in a way you don't like? Thanks, I'll try to keep up the good work.
Ha ha, yes, it is quite amusing to be sent to prison for a nonviolent offense (typing on a keyboard, for instance) and subsequently violently raped repeatedly by multiple large black men while the guards stand by and laugh and the prison wardens make no effort to keep it from happening. We will be sure to laugh heartily when you, your brother, father, son, uncle and/or cousins are sentenced to 30 days for some minor offense which they may or may not have committed. We will chuckle about the fact that they have a very good chance of coming home broken and scarred physically and psychologically by their horrifying experiences. Ha ha ha.
Rape is immoral. Rape is inhuman. Rape is cruel and unusual punishment, and we have laws against that. I always find it entertaining how our entire prison establishment feels these laws are unimportant, and our culture thinks that jokes about young, weak, and sometimes innocent people getting forcibly sodomized is a fabulous thing to joke about. Wait, no, I don't find it entertaining. I find it makes me sick to my stomach.
It's also heartening to see every prison rape joke getting a +5, Funny. Thank you, moderators. Great way to get karma. Keep up the good work.
Help Stop Prisoner Rape by not treating it like a joke.
Yo, RFTP/RTFA. It says in both the article and the post that the witness saw the person "testing" the virus, not writing it. Which is even more scary in a way. How did the witness know what he was doing? What day was it? Which version is he supposed to have written? Oh, and there has been "no arrest made in this matter yet."
The BBC article contains a bit more info: It says he's suspected of altering the original MSBlast worm into one that would cause more damage.
It also says: "Reports suggest he is likely to be arrested by the end of the day." WTF? They're giving him advance warning?!? Run, boy, RUN!!! LOL.
I disagree strongly with this statement. I've been quite comfortable with Win98, BeOS, Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, IceWM and KDE at various times, yet WinXP's default interface makes me queasy. Especially that new start menu, and most of the new control panel interfaces. They must have been smoking crack if they thought they were "simplifying" things there. Ick. So I always change the WinXP interface to the classic Win98 interface. And then I happily return to my Linux/KDE desktop. Thus, I don't think you can make a blanket statement that if you were confused by WinXP's interface you'll be confused by any Linux interface. WinXP is very confusing in many ways.
Everyone knows 6 baud modems were powered by rabid WEASELS.
I think the point really is that for some odd reason, people like myself and n1k0 have trouble figuring out how to do all those things in GNOME, yet knowing just as little about KDE, we can wander around the panels and menus and very quickly get something set up to our personal specifications. Something about GNOME just isn't intuitive to us. I couldn't tell you where the difference lies, but it's huge. If generally intelligent technical users are unable to get GNOME set up how they want it, there's something wrong with GNOME.
It's not like we have anything against GNOME. Like n1k0 said, I'd like to like GNOME, I really would. It just doesn't give me what I want, and KDE does, despite possibly being slower than GNOME. Although personally I've never noticed a real difference between the two, speedwise.
Ah, someone beat me to it. I was about to say I thought the whole reason for "May contain peanuts" was so that people could avoid those particular products.
I remember this one episode of Freaks & Geeks where the geek had a peanut allergy and some jackass stuck some peanuts in his sandwich at lunch in the cafeteria. He went down within a matter of seconds from (apparently) a violent swelling of the tissues in his airway, and had to be immediately hospitalized, coming close to death because some idiot wanted to be funny.
Of course it was a dramatization, but if this peanut allergy is really anything like that, I'm sure I would want to stay away from anything with even a molecule of peanut matter in it. It's literally a matter of life and death for some folks.
I think the parent post needs to be modded up so more people see the correct reason for that label. The grandparent post had it backwards, it's not the nuts that are dangerous, it's the peanuts.
So when you cook or bake things with peanuts to feed to the public or people that you don't necessarily know, make sure that they know it contains peanuts. I don't know about the rest of you, but accidentally killing someone would tend to make me feel bad.
I have had to do exactly that, and the same goes for a lot of the other things he talks about. This is where you're average user will be saying, "The proc what?" And I'm using Mandrake 9.1, which most of us I believe would think of as one of the easiest distros to use.
It has to be said, over and over again whenever an article like this comes up: Linux has a loooooong way to go to create a usable desktop in the same sense that a Windows or Mac desktop is usable. Now, pardon me while I return to my MDK9.1 desktop, to watch my movies, surf the web and pull the pictures off my camera by opening Konsole and typing "mount
Mmm, yeah. Fluxbox. Yeah. Nowwww, how does that work again? Yeah, because I have no idea. I've tried it a half-dozen times, after seeing people rave about it. I still really have no clue how to use it to do the things I want to do. I just run right back to my easily-configured KDE desktop, which by now doesn't resemble a Windows desktop much anymore.
Same thing with WindowMaker, and GNOME. I keep seeing someone going off the deep end about how either of those is the perfect window manager, so I give them another try. But it's no use. I just don't understand how to fit into their flow, and accomplish the tasks I want to accomplish.
So here's my brilliant idea: All of you window manager advocates really need to make videos, *showing* us how to use the window manager of your choice. How to customize it and configure it. How to switch between windows, desktops and applications. Show us all the wonderful things that make you think Fluxbox, or whatever, is so wonderful. Because without that, most people will never understand.
Just like me. By most indicators I'm a rather intelligent person. I'm the person everyone calls to fix their computer. But I step into WindowMaker and I'm completely and utterly lost. I don't understand how it works, and can't figure it out by fiddling around with it. I've never had this problem with KDE, Windows (from 3.0 to XP), BeOS, Mac OS 9/X, etc. With them, I fiddle around for a while, and I'm ready to go. I don't know why this is. They certainly aren't all the same.
I'm actually serious about this. Screenshots just don't tell the whole story about any distro, desktop environment or window manager. People need to be able to see how they work, not just what they look like. Especially if they work any differently than what they're used to. So I hope to see some videos popping up all over the web.
Ha.
I was helping out one of my former college professors last year, he needed to set up a lab full of computers with drawing pads for a fine arts camp. It was a small lab, we were given a dozen Dell Latitude wireless laptops running Win2K. I set things up so that the computers could also be used to access the Internet through a router, so the kids and teachers could check e-mail and such during lunch and after classes were over for the day.
By the end of the second or third day, every computer in that room had MSN Messenger installed, plus most of them had other idiotic things like Audio Galaxy, Gator, etc. MSN, IE, MSN.com, Hotmail, that's all I ever saw any of those kids, or the teachers, using. It's like none of them had any idea that there were any alternatives to Microsoft, nor any reason they might want to use anything other than what they had been spoonfed on their computers at home and at school. It was downright scary. The kids were from all over Alaska. I had Mozilla and some other things on a couple of computers and none of them had even heard of it.
I tried to clean up all the adware, spyware and other junk they had all installed, but I'm sure the university that loaned us the laptops ended up having to wipe the drives and put on fresh images. They'd be insane not to.
Just FYI for Mandrake users:
That procedure looks very involved. Fortunately, for those using Mandrake 9.0/9.1, like myself, all the components have been installed and configured for you already. You can optionally encrypt any partition during the install, including swap partitions, just by checking a box in the advanced options for that partition and entering your 20+ character pass phrase. The only OS I knew about before this that would encrypt swap partitions was OpenBSD.
If you've got somewhere to move your files temporarily, you can also do this to any partition even after you've installed the system. However trying to create an encrypted partition in DiskDrake after you're in an installed system will just create a regular partition. A couple of necessary steps seem to have been left out of the non-install DiskDrake scripts, so you'll have to run the missing commands on the partition yourself to actually create an encrypted filesystem.
I found this out after reading "man losetup", thus ending weeks of irritation about why I couldn't create another encrypted partition in DiskDrake. At the same time I discovered there are options for three different levels of AES encryption, 128, 192, and 256. If you do this during the install process it defaults to using AES128, so by doing this manually you can get much stronger encryption.
So the steps are, basically, to use DiskDrake to set up the partition and mark it encrypted, that will set up the entry in
Just replace whatever example filename they give in the man page with the name of the partition you just modified, e.g. "/dev/hda6" or whatever, and mkfs the same filesystem on it that you specified in DiskDrake (or you'll have to change that entry in
I have also read somewhere that you can somehow set up PAM authentication so that encrypted devices are mounted when you log in, but that would seem to mostly defeat the purpose of the strong encryption in the first place, but if you care more about ease-of-use than the security, that's another option to look over.
I'd really like to see some references on the actual strength of the different encryption levels (like, how long would it take to break each level), and how much the encryption affects the I/O speed of the partition. I know it does slow it down a little bit.
I'd also like to know about any GUI mount program that has built-in support for detecting the password prompt and asking the user for the password instead of just failing. Mounting encrypted drives is one of the last things I *have* to descend to the command line to accomplish. (Not that I'm not in there all day anyway, but it's the principle of the thing. Come on KDE! I can do everything else graphically now, why not this?
... who read the first sentence of the post and thought SCO was suing OSCON because they were using 'SCO' in the name of their conference?
The bad thing is, I believed SCO was actually capable of stooping that low! (For a few seconds, at least. LOL.)
IQ, a quotient based on a battery of tests on such things as math, reading, logic, and spatial skills, is not the same thing as Social Intelligence. Social Intelligence might also be referred to as "street smarts" or knowing how to deal with people. It's quite possible to have one without even a shred of the other. As most of us geeks know. So yes, Mensa doesn't necessarily require you to have the "smarts" to know not to brag about your IQ, but that doesn't prove the original poster isn't "intelligent" in those other ways. In fact, he could even be a genius.
And now something for our moderators: Who's this SCO character I keep hearing about? Was he the bad guy in "Hackers"?
I think the
Read the subject. Everyone who is asking the (dumb) question here, "How can you undercut a free product by giving away something for free?" has failed to realize one thing: Windows is still easier to use than Linux. Period.
If you don't agree with this then you're a real Linux zealot, or you just have no clue how actual non-technical users think and work with computers. Don't feel bad, I've fallen into the same fantasy several times. But every time I set a real user down in front of a Linux machine, I realize yet again that Linux has a long way to go. You cannot, I say again, you CANNOT find a Linux distro to this day that is truly the equivalent to Windows in terms of making your computer easy to work with. (The closest is probably Xandros, with its proprietary file manager.)
I can think of a lot of examples but one of the biggest ones in my mind is the fact that Linux makes it so damn complicated to work with all the different drives attached to your system. In Windows, if you attach an external Firewire or USB storage device, or anything else for that matter, it will first be installed and from then on it will automagically appear in the file manager. I have yet to find the equivalent behaviour in any Linux program or desktop environment.
Oh, and you'd like to eject a disk? Sorry, as long as a single obscure, hidden application or daemon is still messing with that drive, you can't unmount it (a totally foreign concept to most people) and thus you can't eject it. Supermount? I'm sorry, but supermount is still a total pain in the ass. I'm using Mandrake 9.1 and I have once again disabled supermount in favor of regular mount options. It just doesn't work the way a human needs it to work. It doesn't even approach the ease with which you can eject a disk in any Windows environment. Yes, I know it's unsafe, but it's EASY, and that's what non-techies care about.
I could fill a book with other usability problems with Linux and its various desktop environments. It's not just the fact that people have used Windows for years. Windows really is still easier to use in so many ways. That doesn't even bring in the application and device compatibility issues.
Last but not least, non-techies either don't know about, or don't care about, the hole they will be digging themselves into by accepting and using proprietary software to create all their documents, thus practically chaining themselves to the Beast from Redmond. They just don't care. They have actual lives and actual work to do, and they don't feel that any of this is important, if they're even aware of it at all.
All this adds up to exactly why "Free Windows" can definitely undercut "Free Linux". Because it's not just about the numbers on the price tag.
As someone mentioned before, regular paper WILL scratch the hell out of the surface of a CD or DVD over time, causing "fogged" spots and making the disc unreadable. This is a really bad idea unless you don't care about your CDs. There are ways to re-treat the surface with things like carnauba wax or Pledge, but you have to use just the right stuff.
A much better solution is sleeves made with smooth plastic and/or non-scratching cloth and/or some other smooth material like those Tyvek sleeves they used to make for 5-1/4 inch floppies. Personally I really like the Case Logic Prosleeves and the pre-made cases.
One place to look at is http://cyberguys.com, they have a good selection of CD case options, even sleeves and racks that you can fit into regular file drawers. I haven't shopped around much but they seemed to have decent prices on most things.
It's a little-known fact that converting all the black to white will reduce the image size by about 99% for each black pixel that's converted.
And if you believe that, you need sleep even worse than I do.
Um... Thank God?
Mandrake 9.0 came out about a year before Red Hat 9, so you've got that part backwards.
;-)
Personally I think they should all just start using a less arbitrary versioning system, like Mandrake Linux 2003.
I thought geeks weren't supposed to have those sort of "instincts". Heh.
Minor problems, he says. We'll show him "minor", won't we, boys? Muwaha-ha-ha-haaa.
There are other reasons to "fool" a non-technical user into using Mozilla rather than IE, besides the "just because" reason. Like the fact that even in the most up-to-date versions of IE there dozens of possibly horrible exploits where simply navigating to the wrong web page could get your computer taken over, or your hard drive wiped (vis-a-vis the very recent huge hole in Microsoft's proprietary Java VM). Or are we supposed to let the ignorant user "choose" to run every executable e-mail attachment and do other dumb, dangerous things, just for the fun of it?
Second point, how many users do you think are going to be visiting WindowsUpdate when they can't even tell the difference between Mozilla and IE? The mother would be highly unlikely to do such a thing at all, and most certainly not without assistance from the son. So "fooling" this person into using a more secure web browser does no real harm and helps keep her from damaging her computer inadvertently. On top of that, I've seen very few web sites lately that ever say they only support IE. Even if they do, they almost invariably work just fine with Mozilla now.
I can't believe you got modded up for such a knee-jerk, non-thinking whine.