BIOS that doesn't boot from CD will solve that. A BIOS password and a padlock on the case prevents you from changing the BIOS. True, you could get a BIOS password cracker, but I don't know of any that work under NT.
Or zip [whatever] up, tunnel through port 53 and email or scp it to yourself.
And why do you think I'll let you connect to whatever DNS server you want?
If you're determined, this isn't a big deal.
If you're determined enough, you can do whatever you want. Of course, this isn't to stop the determined folks. It's mainly to stop the inadvertent folks - the ones who copy data to a USB key to work on it at home without realizing the security implications of it. It also, with sensible firewalls and other security measures, blocks a large number of hostile folks. Those that can work around these measures should be working in the IT department, in which case they can just disable the setting.;)
This is plain stupid. The Register has evidently missed the idea that a PC is not solely a web browser. Disabling the services they mention would essentially turn Windows into IE. A lot of home users (and SOHO users) have networks and share files and printers - but they don't have a competent sysadmin. Having SP2 break these networks would be a HUGE PITA...and cause MS a lot of grief. And then, to top it off, they recommend leaving Automatic Updates off! That's freakin' ridiculous! If there's even been an exploit of Remote Assistance, I haven't heard of it. I do know of a few cases where it's come in mighty handy, though. I also have a hard time imagining any exploit in the QoS Packet Scheduler. I'm surprised the Register thinks that SP2 should turn Windows into IE and only allow web browsing. Maybe there's a market for that, but I don't think many people would be happy with their "solution".
As for the firewall, egress filtering is overkill - plain and simple. I've been annoyed WAY too many times with SW firewalls constantly asking for permissions - and I know what I'm doing. Most home users blindly click Yes anyways (that's why they have the spyware/virus in the first place), so why bother? NAT (which, in effect, is the same as ingress filters) has been accepted as the norm for many SMB networks so why shouldn't it be acceptable for the Windows firewall? If you really want more control, go download ZoneAlarm or something. Even better, get yourself a real firewall and be done with it. SW firewalls in general are a dumb, dumb idea.
Okay...I do agree with their view on limited user accounts. Unfortunately, a lot of Windows software was never designed (or still isn't designed) to support multiple or limited users - so, once again, MS is stuck between being secure by default or breaking things. Since they (presumably) know their user base isn't too keen on having once working apps broken, they chose the lesser of two evils. It's a tough call, and one I'm glad I don't have to make.
As for the Inspiron 1150 problem, Dell should be supporting SP2. It's an official MS update to a supported OS, and Dell is required to support it. If they can't figure out that it's a processor driver, then they're seriously incompetent. SP2 was in beta for quite awhile, and I'm sure Dell had access to it - there's no excuse for them not being ready for it. It strikes me as being ridiculously obvious. (SpeedStep broken? Hmm...lookie here - it looks like there's a new CPU driver. Maybe if we try the known working one?)
One of the real possibilities here is that police set up a system of justice outside of the courts, where evertime someone is seen doing something "suspicious" their name is recorded which serves to build up a record, so that laws which have been enacted to give police wider "discretion" will be enforced against those that are the most "suspicious" which usually means those that are most unlike or unfamiliar to the policeman.
About 10 years ago, I did some work for a city (~30,000 pop) police station. They'd record "suspicious" persons on note cards.
A suspicious person could be, and often was, nothing more than a group of teenagers walking around the strip mall that the movie theater was in at night. They would be stopped, ID'd, and recorded on a note card. You could also get a card filled out for you if someone called in and filed a "suspicious" report on you (the caller would have to ID you by name).
Eventually, all those cards would end up in a database. So, don't worry...it's not a possibilty, it's been done for at least 10 years.;)
The point about knowing how to operate a computer before using one is elitist at best. Everyone I know who uses a computer knows how to operate it... I know this because they can turn it on, use programs, and type on the keyboard. Can they use it as well as we, the experts? No. But I can't drive a city bus, jet the engines on a harley or even do a wheelie on my Magna, but I certainly can drive my car and I do a good job on my bike.
And you had to get a license to drive your car and your bike. And part of getting that license was learning the rules of the road, how to operate your car without interfering with others, and how to keep your car in good operating condition. And, if you break those rules, there's punishments - anything from fines, to imprisonment, to losing your license. Where's the punishments for refusing to take care of your PC and interfering with others'?
And at least from my perspective I've known my father to twice be unable to run stuff he needed for work (he's not Joe User, either) after a Microsoft patch goofed with it, mostly because he uses stuff that is fairly obscure and so Microsoft doesn't check it.
Microsoft shouldn't have to check every third party app out there to verify it works after a patch. 3rd party vendors should be checking their own apps, and updating them if necessary. It's not like MS is changing the API with these patches. Besides, what would you have MS do? Not release patches? Test every app under the sun? Sometimes, upgrading stuff breaks shit. We all know that. I'd say that with the number of patches MS releases and the number of desktops running Windows, that they do a pretty good job of not breaking stuff. Besides, I'd rather deal with a known MS patch (that usually has an uninstall feature, and writes messages to the event log, with a KB article detailing changed files) than an unknown Trojan or virus.
While he is smart enough to use MozMail instead of Outlook, that doesn't change my hesitance to expect people to use auto-updated. In fact, at least one of my employers has forbidden Windows users to auto-update -any- machines that connect to the VPN, preferring instead to tell people what/when to patch.
Then that company is taking a calculated risk, which hopefully your admin knows. But Joe User, being bereft of this knowledge, should most definitely use automatic updates. If he doesn't, then he has to take responsibility for not using the tools given to him. If I purposefully under-inflate my tires to get a better ride, why should the tire manafacturer be held liable when it blows? Microsoft needs to step up in the area of corporate patch management, especially servers. Their home-user base already has a ridiculously easy method. People just need to use it.
So for this point the blame is shared by the company that manufactures software that is easy to infect without building in enough safeguards around it.
It's not that Windows is easy to infect. If you run untrustworthy programs, then you take your chances on what that program will do. That's a fact of computing. I have zero sympathy for users who fall for the most primitive email attachment viruses. If they'd learn proper English, they could spot 80% of the virus emails just by reading them. If they'd keep antivirus updated, they'd protect themselves against the other 19%. For all that's been said of Outlook's and IE's scripting vulnerabilities, the great majority of viruses are still executable attachments. And yet people still run them. Why?
If I build a car myself, or if I soup it up, and then go driving, yeah, it is my fault if things go kablooie. But not with a brand new untouched Honda Civic.
Windows is not going "kablooie". It's being vandalized, hacked, and stolen by other people. All of these things can and do happen to cars - both new and old. Yet no one blames the car manafacturers when people leave their doors unlocked because it's easier or more convenient, or they just don't know any better.
think if you're going to lay the responsibility chain, it lies primarily with the virus author.
Agreed.
Subsequently, the responsibility lies on the DSL service provider who KNOWS they are selling to often uninformed users and yet fail to provide adequate first (NOC) or second level (CPE) protection for these users.
Most ISPs that I know use ingress and egress filtering to block NetBIOS ports and the like. They also use network monitoring to monitor bandwidth usage. And alot are blocking outgoing port 25 connections. A good many are running virus scans on their POP3/IMAP servers as well. I don't know how much more they should be doing. All of these things that they do not only protect the clueless, but also impact the users who know what they're doing - and break some portion of network functionality. How much further should they go when there are readily available tools for the clueless to use to protect themselves? Outbound HTTP/S only?
Next responsility lands in the laps of those people who wrote software that was prone to infection.
How difficult is it to turn on automatic updates? Win2K/XP constantly pop up a reminder telling you to do it. What more should MS do?
Last, reponsibility makes it to Joe User at that point and then recycles to the beginning for any systems that his infection spreads to.
Joe User needs to know how to operate a computer before using one. Nobody's asking him to learn the OSI model or subnet masking. Turn on Automatic Updates and keep a virus scanner running. A NAT router and/or firewall wouldn't be a bad idea either (if you don't know what that is, ask your ISP. I'm sure they'd be happy to sell you one and even install it). Is that so difficult to comprehend?
It's not like Microsoft and other software makers are not releasing patches...they are. It's up to the users to apply them. It's easy to do. It's relatively painless, even over a 56K connection. What's the problem?
ISP's are in the business of selling connectivity. If you want to be limited in your Internet usage because you don't want to secure your PC, go with the newbie's fav choice: AOL. They'll protect you. Let the ISP's give the rest of us unfettered access without having to pay for unneeded services designed to protect us from ourselves.
If you mass-produce CD's, they are very cheap. If you duplicate, say, 1000, you might pay something like $1/cd to get them with a jewel case and cover. Of course, 1000 copies of CD for source code is probably more than sveasoft is going to need/want. If you only duplicate a few, say, 100, you're probably going to be paying more like $3/CD.
I'm going on the assumption here that they aren't mass-producing any CDs, they are just burning them in-house as they are requested.
Yeah, $3-$4 per CD outsourced sounds about right. Which is a hell of a lot less than Sveasoft is charging. And those companies are making a profit on their CD burning, something Sveasoft is forbidden to do under the GPL.
Now, if you have an employee that's normally doing work where they earn the company $50/hr, and are forced to make them burn CDs, why should you dump that profit and only charge $10 for a CD (minus media cost, minus employee wage, minus shipping, minus overhead (electricity, cost of equipment, furniture, etcetc))? You're probably in the hole at that point.
Then you're terribly inefficient. Like we both stated, you can get them recorded, cased, and shipped for $3-4 each. And those companies also have overhead.
Now of course, my arguments don't take into account what is actually happening here - they are complying with the GPL to provide their modifications. Morally, should they be making a profit from distributing these CDs? I don't think so.
Exactly my point. When a commercial, for-profit company can beat a supposed non-profit operation on a greater than 10 magnitude, someone is being fleeced...and it's not Sveasoft.
And it's not a moral argument, it's a legal one. And they're violating it.
The only reason someone would pay $50 for a CD is for the contents of the CD, not the service of burning it. Sveasoft, per the GPL, is not allowed to charge (beyond what was paid for the binary) for the source code contained on the CD. So, what exactly are they charging for?
Sveasoft could probably justify $49 as being "reasonable". There is the cost of shipping and the media, of course, which isn't very much. But someone also has to burn it. They could very well be charging a normal hourly fee (say $50/hr) to have that person burn the CD. You could also factor in the cost of the cd burner itself (depreciated over x number of copies), or maybe a rental fee for using the burner. They could also being doing the same thing with a system dedicated to burning the CDs.
And yet I can buy thousands upon thousands of CD's and/or DVD's for less than $50/each. Those other companies must be amzingly efficient compared to Sveasoft. And they're charging enough to make a profit too!
Yep. If they pay somebody $50 an hour to burn 1 CD, I say they need all the money we can give them.
I don't know of a single person who doesn't want to keep more $$$ in their pocket. Those that make the most $$$ generally (not always, but generally) create jobs by doing one of two things:
1. Becoming a consumer. These people purchase things that have to be manufactured, or want services that can only be met by someone else.
2. Creating a business.
And poor folks don't spend money? And the governmet doesn't spend money? Hell, the gov't spends more money than it's got (as do most poor people)....how can that be bad for the economy?
If you give money to the poor, the rich, or the gov't it all gets spent and invested. It's just a matter of which part of the cycle it starts in. By giving it to the rich, you short circuit the cycle whereby poor folks or the gov't spend it and it ends up with the rich anyway. Who in turn invest it or spend it, and some portion of it falls back down to the poor folks getting paid to work or the gov't in taxes. And the cycle goes on.
Of course, with the Fed Reserve requiring, IIRC, 10% of any deposits in a bank to be held in reserve, anyone with a bank account has removed 10% of its value from the economic cycle. Since upper class people have larger bank accounts than poor, tax cuts to the rich remove 10% of the cut from the cycle sooner than an equivalent tax cut to the poor would.
As a former consultant both on my own and under the umbrella of a small business, I've often "fired" customers. We've all had abusive, in one way or another, customers. Whether it's the guy who asks a million questions off the clock, or the one who always complains and refuses to pay until they need something else. I'm grateful that my boss/owner of the small business I worked for saw things similarly and was not against reviewing a customer's behaivor and refusing to do business with them if they were a problem. Of course, he taught me a valuable lesson....You never, ever, tell the customer you don't want their business. You offer them a choice, and they choose not to do business with you. Whether it's by extending lead times to a ridiculous amount, pointing them to a competitor that would be "better suited" for them, or charging them higher rates - there's ways of getting them to not do business with you.
Of course, that may be a luxury small businesses can afford and larger ones may run into logistical problems with. But, I see no problem with them refusing to serve certain customers. Best Buy's service will, in all probability, continue to suck...but then I can always refuse to do business with them as well.
Get the beta of Visual Studio 2005's VC++ Express. There's also versions available for ASP.NET, VC#, VJ#, and VB.NET as well as a free SQL 2005 MSDE replacement. They're not slated to be free (except SQL 2005 Express), but will be cheap - at least compared to Visual Studio.
Now... creating symbolic and hard links in NTFS, and having the boot partition on a separate HD than your C:\Windows (C:\WINNT) directory, well those are options that you have to go without.
NTFS does support hard links for files. Use "fsutil hardlinks create" to do it. At least one person has made a GUI to do it too, check out Hard Link Magic. If you want to link a folder or drive, it's termed a junction point. Read the nitty gritty here. "mountvol" will do it for drives, "linkd" (from the Resource Kit) will do it for folders, and Junction Link Magic will do it thru a GUI.
Shortcuts are MS's version of symlinks, but there are important differences between the two.
Oh and you can't have your boot partition on a different drive than %WINDIR% because that's the definition of the boot partition: where %WINDIR% resides! I think what you meant is your system partition - which is where the boot files reside (Unintuitive? You bet!)...which can in fact be on a different drive than your boot partition. Anyone who has more than one MS OS on their PC can attest to that.
If you look at the Netscan website, they have taken a different approach then Google's Groups. I remember seeing something similar on a news.microsoft.com reader some time ago. It actually performs some statistical analysis on the newsgroups, giving you stats on how many posts go unanswered, how many regulars there are, what percentage of posts are cross-posts, average line count, etc. That can help non-regulars of Usenet (like myself) quickly narrow down to some specific high-quality groups. There's even a "treemap" showing group activity.
Of course, I don't know how relevant this will all be to making Usenet accessible to more people...but I guess that's why it's called Research.
Newsbot also has some intersting twists compared to Google's News. It tries to be Tivo-like and recommend stories based on past clicks. It also gives a Most Popular ranking, which is interesting to see what people are reading.
I've never used 3 degrees or Orkut, so I won't comment on those. And everybody has a toolbar these days...I'm just surprised MSN's is still in beta. I half expect that it would install automatically when you visit msn.com.
Now, if they'd only learn the value of Google's so simple, yet so easy to use (and on the eyes) interface. And maybe move it out from the msn.com domain (which I always associate as AOL-wannabe) to microsoft.com...they just might have something here.
But I'm sure the accountants and marketing execs will screw it up before it ever launches.
Everything you said is spot-on...except for logging on with the same user. That makes tracking and auditing more difficult. I suggest creating different users for each machine, and just adding them to a security group and/or OU for management. you can also restrict Logon hours and/or machines to logon to if need be.
One thing I've had trouble with custom shells is that they don't restart if exited normally. I wrote a WSH script to handle that - it simply checks the process list and starts the shell if it's not there. I set the custom shell to the VBS script and pass it the process to start.
If an internet kiosk is what you need, Public Web Browser is a decent and cheap option. IE in kiosk mode with a proxy, disabled Internet options (through Group Policy), and other workstation restrictions is also doable and free, but not as easy to secure.
Just a suggestion to the OP, you want to lock down the user, not the machine. Perhaps that's why you're not finding the GPO settings you need?
Oh, I see. You did everything wrong and it's Windows fault.
You should've just changed the registry entry (for NT) or system.ini (for 9x) line to change your shell, not renamed your file.
You forgot to rename explorer.exe back.
You could've booted to DOS (for 9x) or the Recovery Console (for 2000+) and fixed it without Linux.
Don't know about Windows systems where you live, but none of mine have HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE (which is where the Services and Run keys are) or Documents and Settings\All Users (Startup folder) world writable either.
You do know that Perl runs on Windows, right? And that Windows comes with a pretty decent CLI, and Cygwin even ported Bash to it? And that VBScript and Windows Scripting Host is the "true" command line of Windows? And that for those few instances where you need to script a GUI operation, there are tools to do that too?
There's very few things Linux will do that Windows won't. But Windows holds the dominant market share and has a lot more commercial support. That's why I (mostly) use Windows.
After setting up a few iMacs and eMacs as Internet kiosks, I'd have to say I find it a lot easier to lock down a Wintel. While OS X does have the nice ability to easily specify what programs can be run by a limited user - which requires RegEdit or Group Policies on Windows; I've found no way to keep them from modifying browser settings, browsing the drive, saving files to home folders or the desktop, or restricting URL's. Maybe I'm missing something? Besides Mac kiosk software? =)
Of course, the lack of genereal knowledge on Macs, especially OS X with it's *nix roots, has helped keep the worst offenders away.
Belkin KVM's use (and Avocent too, I think) 2xScrollLock as a control key to switch PC's. ScrollLock in Excel does something where it'll scroll the entire page instead of by cell....I've never really used it for that, but I'm sure somebody has.
But how much does Outlook cost? How much do the Microsoft versions cost? Aren't those people paying for Outlook already? Doesn't Outlook cost about 90-100 bucks per copy? Isn't a $60 alternative cheaper?
If you have a licensed Exchange Server, you receive the same amount of Outlook licenses as you have Exchange CALs. Exchange CALs are going for around $65, add in another $25 or so for Software Assurance. So, assuming you're using the Ximian connector to connect to Exchange, no $60 isn't cheaper than included (you're still going to need the CAL).
Isn't one of the goals of credit cards convenience? I mean, I could put all of my money in a pot, bury it where someone will never find it and pull from it when I needed and it would be pretty secure, but it's just too much work.
Is that why credit card companies continously ignore the painfully obvious means of ID the rest of the USA depends on: the driver's license (or military/state ID card)?
If you write (or cash) a check, they check ID. Want some beer or smokes? Where's your ID? Need a passport? You need an ID. Got arrested? Better have some ID. Renting a car? Let me copy that ID. New job? Need an ID and Social Security card.
Want a credit card? Just fill out this pre-approved application with your name and SS#, and we'll send you one. Oh, and when you get it, sign the back so some 16 year old high school dropout can "verify" it's you when you use it...if they even bother to check, that is.
And then, when "identity theft" (It's not identity theft. It's credit card companies getting conned because they're stupid.) becomes a problem, they spend millions of dollars enacting inane schemes such as this to verify identity. Bloody brilliant, I tell you.
I actually use TightVNC, and while it's much better than VNC, it doesn't hold up against RDP. Also, the compression options can seriously degrade image quality. I haven't used Ultr@VNC, but will take a look at it. Especially interesting, besides the video hooking, is the AD integration. I also noticed that it supports plugins for encryption (among other things), but only one for Win32 is currently available.
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BIOS that doesn't boot from CD will solve that. A BIOS password and a padlock on the case prevents you from changing the BIOS. True, you could get a BIOS password cracker, but I don't know of any that work under NT.
And why do you think I'll let you connect to whatever DNS server you want?
If you're determined enough, you can do whatever you want. Of course, this isn't to stop the determined folks. It's mainly to stop the inadvertent folks - the ones who copy data to a USB key to work on it at home without realizing the security implications of it. It also, with sensible firewalls and other security measures, blocks a large number of hostile folks. Those that can work around these measures should be working in the IT department, in which case they can just disable the setting. ;)
As for the firewall, egress filtering is overkill - plain and simple. I've been annoyed WAY too many times with SW firewalls constantly asking for permissions - and I know what I'm doing. Most home users blindly click Yes anyways (that's why they have the spyware/virus in the first place), so why bother? NAT (which, in effect, is the same as ingress filters) has been accepted as the norm for many SMB networks so why shouldn't it be acceptable for the Windows firewall? If you really want more control, go download ZoneAlarm or something. Even better, get yourself a real firewall and be done with it. SW firewalls in general are a dumb, dumb idea.
Okay...I do agree with their view on limited user accounts. Unfortunately, a lot of Windows software was never designed (or still isn't designed) to support multiple or limited users - so, once again, MS is stuck between being secure by default or breaking things. Since they (presumably) know their user base isn't too keen on having once working apps broken, they chose the lesser of two evils. It's a tough call, and one I'm glad I don't have to make.
As for the Inspiron 1150 problem, Dell should be supporting SP2. It's an official MS update to a supported OS, and Dell is required to support it. If they can't figure out that it's a processor driver, then they're seriously incompetent. SP2 was in beta for quite awhile, and I'm sure Dell had access to it - there's no excuse for them not being ready for it. It strikes me as being ridiculously obvious. (SpeedStep broken? Hmm...lookie here - it looks like there's a new CPU driver. Maybe if we try the known working one?)
About 10 years ago, I did some work for a city (~30,000 pop) police station. They'd record "suspicious" persons on note cards.
A suspicious person could be, and often was, nothing more than a group of teenagers walking around the strip mall that the movie theater was in at night. They would be stopped, ID'd, and recorded on a note card. You could also get a card filled out for you if someone called in and filed a "suspicious" report on you (the caller would have to ID you by name).
Eventually, all those cards would end up in a database. So, don't worry...it's not a possibilty, it's been done for at least 10 years. ;)
And you had to get a license to drive your car and your bike. And part of getting that license was learning the rules of the road, how to operate your car without interfering with others, and how to keep your car in good operating condition. And, if you break those rules, there's punishments - anything from fines, to imprisonment, to losing your license. Where's the punishments for refusing to take care of your PC and interfering with others'?
Microsoft shouldn't have to check every third party app out there to verify it works after a patch. 3rd party vendors should be checking their own apps, and updating them if necessary. It's not like MS is changing the API with these patches. Besides, what would you have MS do? Not release patches? Test every app under the sun? Sometimes, upgrading stuff breaks shit. We all know that. I'd say that with the number of patches MS releases and the number of desktops running Windows, that they do a pretty good job of not breaking stuff. Besides, I'd rather deal with a known MS patch (that usually has an uninstall feature, and writes messages to the event log, with a KB article detailing changed files) than an unknown Trojan or virus.
Then that company is taking a calculated risk, which hopefully your admin knows. But Joe User, being bereft of this knowledge, should most definitely use automatic updates. If he doesn't, then he has to take responsibility for not using the tools given to him. If I purposefully under-inflate my tires to get a better ride, why should the tire manafacturer be held liable when it blows? Microsoft needs to step up in the area of corporate patch management, especially servers. Their home-user base already has a ridiculously easy method. People just need to use it.
It's not that Windows is easy to infect. If you run untrustworthy programs, then you take your chances on what that program will do. That's a fact of computing. I have zero sympathy for users who fall for the most primitive email attachment viruses. If they'd learn proper English, they could spot 80% of the virus emails just by reading them. If they'd keep antivirus updated, they'd protect themselves against the other 19%. For all that's been said of Outlook's and IE's scripting vulnerabilities, the great majority of viruses are still executable attachments. And yet people still run them. Why?
Windows is not going "kablooie". It's being vandalized, hacked, and stolen by other people. All of these things can and do happen to cars - both new and old. Yet no one blames the car manafacturers when people leave their doors unlocked because it's easier or more convenient, or they just don't know any better.
Agreed.
Most ISPs that I know use ingress and egress filtering to block NetBIOS ports and the like. They also use network monitoring to monitor bandwidth usage. And alot are blocking outgoing port 25 connections. A good many are running virus scans on their POP3/IMAP servers as well. I don't know how much more they should be doing. All of these things that they do not only protect the clueless, but also impact the users who know what they're doing - and break some portion of network functionality. How much further should they go when there are readily available tools for the clueless to use to protect themselves? Outbound HTTP/S only?
How difficult is it to turn on automatic updates? Win2K/XP constantly pop up a reminder telling you to do it. What more should MS do?
Joe User needs to know how to operate a computer before using one. Nobody's asking him to learn the OSI model or subnet masking. Turn on Automatic Updates and keep a virus scanner running. A NAT router and/or firewall wouldn't be a bad idea either (if you don't know what that is, ask your ISP. I'm sure they'd be happy to sell you one and even install it). Is that so difficult to comprehend?
It's not like Microsoft and other software makers are not releasing patches...they are. It's up to the users to apply them. It's easy to do. It's relatively painless, even over a 56K connection. What's the problem?
ISP's are in the business of selling connectivity. If you want to be limited in your Internet usage because you don't want to secure your PC, go with the newbie's fav choice: AOL. They'll protect you. Let the ISP's give the rest of us unfettered access without having to pay for unneeded services designed to protect us from ourselves.
Yeah, we could've saved everybody the time it took to RTFA with a little math. 3200/3000 = 1.067 = 6.7% faster. Article over.
Just FYI, unstable+jardine gives 2,430 hits. I don't know that we should trust you.
Yeah, $3-$4 per CD outsourced sounds about right. Which is a hell of a lot less than Sveasoft is charging. And those companies are making a profit on their CD burning, something Sveasoft is forbidden to do under the GPL.
Then you're terribly inefficient. Like we both stated, you can get them recorded, cased, and shipped for $3-4 each. And those companies also have overhead.
Exactly my point. When a commercial, for-profit company can beat a supposed non-profit operation on a greater than 10 magnitude, someone is being fleeced...and it's not Sveasoft.
And it's not a moral argument, it's a legal one. And they're violating it.
The only reason someone would pay $50 for a CD is for the contents of the CD, not the service of burning it. Sveasoft, per the GPL, is not allowed to charge (beyond what was paid for the binary) for the source code contained on the CD. So, what exactly are they charging for?
And yet I can buy thousands upon thousands of CD's and/or DVD's for less than $50/each. Those other companies must be amzingly efficient compared to Sveasoft. And they're charging enough to make a profit too!
Yep. If they pay somebody $50 an hour to burn 1 CD, I say they need all the money we can give them.
And poor folks don't spend money? And the governmet doesn't spend money? Hell, the gov't spends more money than it's got (as do most poor people)....how can that be bad for the economy?
If you give money to the poor, the rich, or the gov't it all gets spent and invested. It's just a matter of which part of the cycle it starts in. By giving it to the rich, you short circuit the cycle whereby poor folks or the gov't spend it and it ends up with the rich anyway. Who in turn invest it or spend it, and some portion of it falls back down to the poor folks getting paid to work or the gov't in taxes. And the cycle goes on.
Of course, with the Fed Reserve requiring, IIRC, 10% of any deposits in a bank to be held in reserve, anyone with a bank account has removed 10% of its value from the economic cycle. Since upper class people have larger bank accounts than poor, tax cuts to the rich remove 10% of the cut from the cycle sooner than an equivalent tax cut to the poor would.
Of course, that may be a luxury small businesses can afford and larger ones may run into logistical problems with. But, I see no problem with them refusing to serve certain customers. Best Buy's service will, in all probability, continue to suck...but then I can always refuse to do business with them as well.
Get the beta of Visual Studio 2005's VC++ Express. There's also versions available for ASP.NET, VC#, VJ#, and VB.NET as well as a free SQL 2005 MSDE replacement. They're not slated to be free (except SQL 2005 Express), but will be cheap - at least compared to Visual Studio.
NTFS does support hard links for files. Use "fsutil hardlinks create" to do it. At least one person has made a GUI to do it too, check out Hard Link Magic. If you want to link a folder or drive, it's termed a junction point. Read the nitty gritty here. "mountvol" will do it for drives, "linkd" (from the Resource Kit) will do it for folders, and Junction Link Magic will do it thru a GUI.
Shortcuts are MS's version of symlinks, but there are important differences between the two.
Oh and you can't have your boot partition on a different drive than %WINDIR% because that's the definition of the boot partition: where %WINDIR% resides! I think what you meant is your system partition - which is where the boot files reside (Unintuitive? You bet!)...which can in fact be on a different drive than your boot partition. Anyone who has more than one MS OS on their PC can attest to that.
Of course, I don't know how relevant this will all be to making Usenet accessible to more people...but I guess that's why it's called Research.
Newsbot also has some intersting twists compared to Google's News. It tries to be Tivo-like and recommend stories based on past clicks. It also gives a Most Popular ranking, which is interesting to see what people are reading.
I've never used 3 degrees or Orkut, so I won't comment on those. And everybody has a toolbar these days...I'm just surprised MSN's is still in beta. I half expect that it would install automatically when you visit msn.com.
Now, if they'd only learn the value of Google's so simple, yet so easy to use (and on the eyes) interface. And maybe move it out from the msn.com domain (which I always associate as AOL-wannabe) to microsoft.com...they just might have something here.
But I'm sure the accountants and marketing execs will screw it up before it ever launches.
One thing I've had trouble with custom shells is that they don't restart if exited normally. I wrote a WSH script to handle that - it simply checks the process list and starts the shell if it's not there. I set the custom shell to the VBS script and pass it the process to start.
If an internet kiosk is what you need, Public Web Browser is a decent and cheap option. IE in kiosk mode with a proxy, disabled Internet options (through Group Policy), and other workstation restrictions is also doable and free, but not as easy to secure.
Just a suggestion to the OP, you want to lock down the user, not the machine. Perhaps that's why you're not finding the GPO settings you need?
The artists are in the alley out back, waiting for the night's scraps.
You should've just changed the registry entry (for NT) or system.ini (for 9x) line to change your shell, not renamed your file.
You forgot to rename explorer.exe back.
You could've booted to DOS (for 9x) or the Recovery Console (for 2000+) and fixed it without Linux.
Yep...sounds like a Windows flaw to me.
Associate .pl files with the Perl.exe interpreter. These days, ActiveState's installer will even do it for you.
Don't know about Windows systems where you live, but none of mine have HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE (which is where the Services and Run keys are) or Documents and Settings\All Users (Startup folder) world writable either.
There's very few things Linux will do that Windows won't. But Windows holds the dominant market share and has a lot more commercial support. That's why I (mostly) use Windows.
Of course, the lack of genereal knowledge on Macs, especially OS X with it's *nix roots, has helped keep the worst offenders away.
Belkin KVM's use (and Avocent too, I think) 2xScrollLock as a control key to switch PC's. ScrollLock in Excel does something where it'll scroll the entire page instead of by cell....I've never really used it for that, but I'm sure somebody has.
If you have a licensed Exchange Server, you receive the same amount of Outlook licenses as you have Exchange CALs. Exchange CALs are going for around $65, add in another $25 or so for Software Assurance. So, assuming you're using the Ximian connector to connect to Exchange, no $60 isn't cheaper than included (you're still going to need the CAL).
Is that why credit card companies continously ignore the painfully obvious means of ID the rest of the USA depends on: the driver's license (or military/state ID card)?
If you write (or cash) a check, they check ID. Want some beer or smokes? Where's your ID? Need a passport? You need an ID. Got arrested? Better have some ID. Renting a car? Let me copy that ID. New job? Need an ID and Social Security card.
Want a credit card? Just fill out this pre-approved application with your name and SS#, and we'll send you one. Oh, and when you get it, sign the back so some 16 year old high school dropout can "verify" it's you when you use it...if they even bother to check, that is.
And then, when "identity theft" (It's not identity theft. It's credit card companies getting conned because they're stupid.) becomes a problem, they spend millions of dollars enacting inane schemes such as this to verify identity. Bloody brilliant, I tell you.
I actually use TightVNC, and while it's much better than VNC, it doesn't hold up against RDP. Also, the compression options can seriously degrade image quality. I haven't used Ultr@VNC, but will take a look at it. Especially interesting, besides the video hooking, is the AD integration. I also noticed that it supports plugins for encryption (among other things), but only one for Win32 is currently available.