It will be used in some offices.. our office will likely deploy thunderbird 2 by the end of the year. We've been on Netscape7 / Mozilla Mail since July 2003, thunderbird will replace it easily. Our calendaring is separate, we use Oracle Calendar (AKA Steltor CorporateTime, Netscape Calendar). I suspect a lot of other universities will consider Thunderbird since Oracle Calendar is popular there.
I can only imagine that Netscape wants to use Netscape 8 to help market its ISP. After using this browser briefly today, I can not really understand who their target audience is. Is it power users? It seems to be intended for power users, it offers a level of control I have never seen before in a browser, multiple rendering engines, user-trust levels and containers, very detailed, site-specific settings. Also, check out the toolbar configuration GUI if you get a chance.. yikes. However, I don't think power users will touch this because they are already aware of firefox and Mozilla. Even though firefox does not have the level of control that this Netscape 8 beta has, who really wants to configure and manage all of that when firefox works perfectly well (minus IE-specific sites) without it?
As far as regular users go, I can not think of any reason why they would prefer this browser over something like IE or firefox. I have thought that for a while, IE has been so popular because of its simplicity. Even though it doesn't support features like tabbed browsing and typeaheadfind and RSS.. your average user doesn't want that stuff anyway, thus IE meets their needs so why change to anything more complex?
So, unless I am missing something, we have a browser here that power users will not use and average users will not use. Perhaps Netscape can get some people to use it if they bundle it with their ISP. It is only beta though, maybe it will get better..
The browser's security model does not matter when it comes to spyware. IE isn't normally exploited to deliver the spyware payload. The user will normally download some mysterious executable from the Internet, run that with full privileges, and then that program contains the payload. Once the user runs the program locally, that program can do whatever it wants to either firefox or IE or your entire computer. The article I believe is correct in saying that mozilla/firefox isn't being targeted because of its relatively small user base. When it becomes significant, you will see some of these. The good news though is that they will be a lot easier to fix since you are only dealing with a small program rather than a browser that is grafted into the operating system.
Does anyone know if it will have an email client or is this anti-phishing stuff just for webmail? Are they are also including a modified and rebranded thunderbird? The story makes it sounds like this is just the web browser and not the suite..
I agree, AVI isn't very user friendly since it is a container format for almost any type of video and/or audio stream imaginable. Most players are not aware of every type of stream and will just spit out undecipherable errors when it comes across a stream it doesn't recognize. However, I do think that the people providing the content have the responsibility for pointing out what software is required, especially if they are using something like AVI or newer technology (ogg/vorbis, DIVX5, etc). If the site would just explain up-front that they need software package X, it isn't so bad.. I personally like putting the codecs in the filename right before the extention for my personal things (somemediafile.mp3.divx5.avi for example).
I agree with you there, I always have thought that these kinds of games should treat the software client as a commodity, and offer it free of charge.. possibly over something like bit-torrent, as they were testing through the beta phase. I'm cheap I know and I don't even like these kinds of games, but it does look overpriced as an outside observer. The client is worthless without the server component and service charge anyway, so why not just give the client away? People that wanted a printed manual, physical media, and a nice box could still pay a nominal fee in a retail store. The service charge per month is probably reasonable, but the initial cost always surprises me.
Hopefully they fixed the AI this time around. I really liked the idea of the first game and I thought it was very innovative and unique.. however the AI really killed it for me. I vowed never to replay the original because of it which is a shame because it could have been a great single player, first-person game. Half-life 1 is still my favorate FPS, single player game by a wide margin though.
There are some good, free memory testing utilities out there like memtest86. They probably still have an ISO image on their website that can be used to create a bootable CD-ROM with the utility configured to start automatically.
I don't really understand this article. It certainly is not new information, hardware passed up most common computer applications a long time ago. Even though most people don't need a ~2.5ghz celeron with 512MB of RAM, 80GB hdd which is about as entry level as you will find in a desktop now.. what are they supposed to do, buy a 3+ year old computer?
The article isn't well written anyway, the introduction makes it sound like the author just realized that the 3+ ghz systems with 4GB of RAM, 256MB video cards, and multi-disc RAID arrays he built for regular email/web using users was overpowered..
The parent is a little misleading in that the address book does not normally disappear. One thing that mozilla can not do for licensing reasons is import the netscape 4 address book. Netscape 7.1, however, can automatically import the address book during initial profile migration.
A migration from NS7.1 to mozilla does not cause data loss in the address book since they both use the same, new mozilla address book format. If I am migrating from Netscape 4 to mozilla, I usually export to LDIF from NS4 and then import it back into mozilla using the LDIF converter.
No, samba / Mac OS X can integrate with an existing active directory infrastructure (core windows machines), but it can not create an active directory infrastructure.
Basic is still fine as an intro language in my opinion. I was one of those kids that screwed around with Apple BASIC when I was growing up. By the time I got to high school, they taught BASIC as the intro programming language. Even though it is not a practical language, it is very good at what it is intended for.. teaching logic concepts that every other practical language uses.
Tablets are really a niche product. For general purposes, they are far worse than laptops. They are also much worse than paper/pencil where notepads are usually used. They do look attractive for special appliations in healthcare though. I've seen several EMR products being peddled, and most would work out very well on tablet PCs because very little typing is involved when using the software. Notebooks don't work as well because the keyboard goes relatively unused.
With a tablet, nurses and physicians can carry around a smart notebook and use it while walking around and interacting with patients. With a laptop or a desktop computer, the patient/provider interaction is less personable because the healthcare provider has a tendency to sit behind a computer.
Yep, I noticed that right away also, it seems that the meaning of vaporware is getting lost. In fact, IIRC, the source code leaked from HL2 sometime last year which proves that it isn't vaporware. I suppose it could be possible for games like DN2 not to exist at all, but I don't think it makes a lot of sense in the computer game software industry to use marketing tactics like that.
The new final fantasy game X-2 is very non-linear.. I just got done playing it and really enjoyed it. It is such a huge improvement over FF X which played more like a movie, the first 90% of the game it just felt like I was pushing O to advance the story along the destined path. The story was very good in X, but unfortuantely I really didn't find it that much fun until the game opened up towards the end.
X-2, however, you are basically free to do what you want whenever you want.. there are a ton of side quests that explore the story more deeply if you want to do them. If you can survive the first cutscene you'll be hooked. I still don't like the way the camera works in X/X-2 and in a few areas there are FPS problems, but overall it is one of my favorite final fantasy games.
Yes, I like the ps utilities, glued together with perl, for quick-and-dirty software deployment and reporting also. The nice thing about the set is that it works with the native NT/2000/XP operating systems without the requirement of third-party software.. in a domain environment it inherits all security.
I have used these for hardware reports, hotfix deployment, and desktop support (pslist/pskill/psinfo).. Lately I have been using Sysinternal's psutilities a LOT, it is definately one of the best sets of CLI utilities I have seen for Windows.
nah, it's the OEMs that should be advertising their systems as "60GB hard drive (56GB usable)", or something like that. OEMs can take into account the filesystem overhead too whereas the hard disc manufacturer can not. OEMs tend to sell to the average user who doesn't care about this overhead or binary math. These are the people who might get their systems setup, and then feel cheated when their brand new computer is short 6GB. Unfortunately, the first vendor to do that would have to have some guts.. people might see machines with less usable space somehow inferior to the deceptive, unformatted disc with rounded off figures.
Anybody who is going to buy and install just a hard drive already knows what they are doing.. I don't see any reason for the manufacturers to change.
I would have to confirm this the next time I setup a new Dell computer, but I am pretty sure that if you upgrade a Dell computer's memory before turning it on initially.. the system will prompt [the amount of system memory has changed, press F1 to continue and F2 to enter Setup] before the EULA screen ever appears.
After that I press F2 and fix the boot order so that the CDROM goes before the hard drive. Then I put in my image CD in and restart the computer.. the image software is configured so that it removes all partitions and installs the image into the full hard drive space. I don't believe that I have ever seen a EULA screen doing this to desktops and laptops. Because Dell charges so much for memory, I usually buy Dell systems with the least amount of memory they will sell and then buy the rest online from other vendors.
Funny article though, I have clicked through the EULA many times after getting new Dell systems and never given a single thought to it. I am glad that someone decided to actually call and share the story.
Mylex controllers work very well for higher end SCSI workstations and servers. I've used these in a few systems and they are very easy to setup in both linux and windows, offer great performance, and well supported. A little on the expensive side though..
actually spamassassin with MIME-rewriting is used to control viruses and disable them at the server level, but you have to have a signature for the virus first. It is too risky to strip on patterns or heuristics. Even mail servers check for new sigs on an interval (and this one was released today).. seeing how quickly these spread, even thirty minutes can be enough time for viruses like this to propagate through an internal network.
There is not much of a security hole here, just a binary attached to an email message. This particular virus does not try to exploit any vulnerabilities that I am aware of. It's the user that tells the computer to download the binary and run it. While the mailer could make it harder to run these from email (and I think most do, but I'm not sure about.scr and.pif), user education is the only thing that will help here, short of whitelisting applications he or she is allowed to run. Virus software doesn't help too much in this case because the virus is out before the signatures are.
There has been a very large outbreak here, inside the firewall this morning.. This is probably the largest that I can remember, since we do not use Outlook/Outlook express we seem to dodge the big ones. I didn't even think this looked that bad at first glance, it doesn't really try to exploit any security holes to infect the machine. What got us was that the virus scanners were just old enough not to catch this until it was too late. All it really took was one or two people opening the attachment. The new engine didn't get pushed until at least an hour after the first internal case was discovered. By then though, it had spread so quickly that many other hosts had been infected.
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It will be used in some offices.. our office will likely deploy thunderbird 2 by the end of the year. We've been on Netscape7 / Mozilla Mail since July 2003, thunderbird will replace it easily. Our calendaring is separate, we use Oracle Calendar (AKA Steltor CorporateTime, Netscape Calendar). I suspect a lot of other universities will consider Thunderbird since Oracle Calendar is popular there.
Yeah, that was a great game.. never could beat it though. I'll have to check out the java version, the Apple computer isn't around anymore.
good point.. lame content, lame contestants. Only the script kiddies would poke at this system.
I can only imagine that Netscape wants to use Netscape 8 to help market its ISP. After using this browser briefly today, I can not really understand who their target audience is. Is it power users? It seems to be intended for power users, it offers a level of control I have never seen before in a browser, multiple rendering engines, user-trust levels and containers, very detailed, site-specific settings. Also, check out the toolbar configuration GUI if you get a chance.. yikes. However, I don't think power users will touch this because they are already aware of firefox and Mozilla. Even though firefox does not have the level of control that this Netscape 8 beta has, who really wants to configure and manage all of that when firefox works perfectly well (minus IE-specific sites) without it?
As far as regular users go, I can not think of any reason why they would prefer this browser over something like IE or firefox. I have thought that for a while, IE has been so popular because of its simplicity. Even though it doesn't support features like tabbed browsing and typeaheadfind and RSS.. your average user doesn't want that stuff anyway, thus IE meets their needs so why change to anything more complex?
So, unless I am missing something, we have a browser here that power users will not use and average users will not use. Perhaps Netscape can get some people to use it if they bundle it with their ISP. It is only beta though, maybe it will get better..
The browser's security model does not matter when it comes to spyware. IE isn't normally exploited to deliver the spyware payload. The user will normally download some mysterious executable from the Internet, run that with full privileges, and then that program contains the payload. Once the user runs the program locally, that program can do whatever it wants to either firefox or IE or your entire computer. The article I believe is correct in saying that mozilla/firefox isn't being targeted because of its relatively small user base. When it becomes significant, you will see some of these. The good news though is that they will be a lot easier to fix since you are only dealing with a small program rather than a browser that is grafted into the operating system.
Does anyone know if it will have an email client or is this anti-phishing stuff just for webmail? Are they are also including a modified and rebranded thunderbird? The story makes it sounds like this is just the web browser and not the suite..
I agree, AVI isn't very user friendly since it is a container format for almost any type of video and/or audio stream imaginable. Most players are not aware of every type of stream and will just spit out undecipherable errors when it comes across a stream it doesn't recognize. However, I do think that the people providing the content have the responsibility for pointing out what software is required, especially if they are using something like AVI or newer technology (ogg/vorbis, DIVX5, etc). If the site would just explain up-front that they need software package X, it isn't so bad.. I personally like putting the codecs in the filename right before the extention for my personal things (somemediafile.mp3.divx5.avi for example).
I agree with you there, I always have thought that these kinds of games should treat the software client as a commodity, and offer it free of charge.. possibly over something like bit-torrent, as they were testing through the beta phase. I'm cheap I know and I don't even like these kinds of games, but it does look overpriced as an outside observer. The client is worthless without the server component and service charge anyway, so why not just give the client away? People that wanted a printed manual, physical media, and a nice box could still pay a nominal fee in a retail store. The service charge per month is probably reasonable, but the initial cost always surprises me.
Hopefully they fixed the AI this time around. I really liked the idea of the first game and I thought it was very innovative and unique.. however the AI really killed it for me. I vowed never to replay the original because of it which is a shame because it could have been a great single player, first-person game. Half-life 1 is still my favorate FPS, single player game by a wide margin though.
There are some good, free memory testing utilities out there like memtest86. They probably still have an ISO image on their website that can be used to create a bootable CD-ROM with the utility configured to start automatically.
I don't really understand this article. It certainly is not new information, hardware passed up most common computer applications a long time ago. Even though most people don't need a ~2.5ghz celeron with 512MB of RAM, 80GB hdd which is about as entry level as you will find in a desktop now.. what are they supposed to do, buy a 3+ year old computer?
The article isn't well written anyway, the introduction makes it sound like the author just realized that the 3+ ghz systems with 4GB of RAM, 256MB video cards, and multi-disc RAID arrays he built for regular email/web using users was overpowered..
The parent is a little misleading in that the address book does not normally disappear. One thing that mozilla can not do for licensing reasons is import the netscape 4 address book. Netscape 7.1, however, can automatically import the address book during initial profile migration.
A migration from NS7.1 to mozilla does not cause data loss in the address book since they both use the same, new mozilla address book format. If I am migrating from Netscape 4 to mozilla, I usually export to LDIF from NS4 and then import it back into mozilla using the LDIF converter.
No, samba / Mac OS X can integrate with an existing active directory infrastructure (core windows machines), but it can not create an active directory infrastructure.
Basic is still fine as an intro language in my opinion. I was one of those kids that screwed around with Apple BASIC when I was growing up. By the time I got to high school, they taught BASIC as the intro programming language. Even though it is not a practical language, it is very good at what it is intended for.. teaching logic concepts that every other practical language uses.
Tablets are really a niche product. For general purposes, they are far worse than laptops. They are also much worse than paper/pencil where notepads are usually used. They do look attractive for special appliations in healthcare though. I've seen several EMR products being peddled, and most would work out very well on tablet PCs because very little typing is involved when using the software. Notebooks don't work as well because the keyboard goes relatively unused.
With a tablet, nurses and physicians can carry around a smart notebook and use it while walking around and interacting with patients. With a laptop or a desktop computer, the patient/provider interaction is less personable because the healthcare provider has a tendency to sit behind a computer.
Yep, I noticed that right away also, it seems that the meaning of vaporware is getting lost. In fact, IIRC, the source code leaked from HL2 sometime last year which proves that it isn't vaporware. I suppose it could be possible for games like DN2 not to exist at all, but I don't think it makes a lot of sense in the computer game software industry to use marketing tactics like that.
The new final fantasy game X-2 is very non-linear.. I just got done playing it and really enjoyed it. It is such a huge improvement over FF X which played more like a movie, the first 90% of the game it just felt like I was pushing O to advance the story along the destined path. The story was very good in X, but unfortuantely I really didn't find it that much fun until the game opened up towards the end.
X-2, however, you are basically free to do what you want whenever you want.. there are a ton of side quests that explore the story more deeply if you want to do them. If you can survive the first cutscene you'll be hooked. I still don't like the way the camera works in X/X-2 and in a few areas there are FPS problems, but overall it is one of my favorite final fantasy games.
Yes, I like the ps utilities, glued together with perl, for quick-and-dirty software deployment and reporting also. The nice thing about the set is that it works with the native NT/2000/XP operating systems without the requirement of third-party software.. in a domain environment it inherits all security.
I have used these for hardware reports, hotfix deployment, and desktop support (pslist/pskill/psinfo).. Lately I have been using Sysinternal's psutilities a LOT, it is definately one of the best sets of CLI utilities I have seen for Windows.
nah, it's the OEMs that should be advertising their systems as "60GB hard drive (56GB usable)", or something like that. OEMs can take into account the filesystem overhead too whereas the hard disc manufacturer can not. OEMs tend to sell to the average user who doesn't care about this overhead or binary math. These are the people who might get their systems setup, and then feel cheated when their brand new computer is short 6GB. Unfortunately, the first vendor to do that would have to have some guts.. people might see machines with less usable space somehow inferior to the deceptive, unformatted disc with rounded off figures.
Anybody who is going to buy and install just a hard drive already knows what they are doing.. I don't see any reason for the manufacturers to change.
I would have to confirm this the next time I setup a new Dell computer, but I am pretty sure that if you upgrade a Dell computer's memory before turning it on initially.. the system will prompt [the amount of system memory has changed, press F1 to continue and F2 to enter Setup] before the EULA screen ever appears.
After that I press F2 and fix the boot order so that the CDROM goes before the hard drive. Then I put in my image CD in and restart the computer.. the image software is configured so that it removes all partitions and installs the image into the full hard drive space. I don't believe that I have ever seen a EULA screen doing this to desktops and laptops. Because Dell charges so much for memory, I usually buy Dell systems with the least amount of memory they will sell and then buy the rest online from other vendors.
Funny article though, I have clicked through the EULA many times after getting new Dell systems and never given a single thought to it. I am glad that someone decided to actually call and share the story.
Mylex controllers work very well for higher end SCSI workstations and servers. I've used these in a few systems and they are very easy to setup in both linux and windows, offer great performance, and well supported. A little on the expensive side though..
silly editors. Yay for SpamAssassin..
actually spamassassin with MIME-rewriting is used to control viruses and disable them at the server level, but you have to have a signature for the virus first. It is too risky to strip on patterns or heuristics. Even mail servers check for new sigs on an interval (and this one was released today).. seeing how quickly these spread, even thirty minutes can be enough time for viruses like this to propagate through an internal network.
There is not much of a security hole here, just a binary attached to an email message. This particular virus does not try to exploit any vulnerabilities that I am aware of. It's the user that tells the computer to download the binary and run it. While the mailer could make it harder to run these from email (and I think most do, but I'm not sure about .scr and .pif), user education is the only thing that will help here, short of whitelisting applications he or she is allowed to run. Virus software doesn't help too much in this case because the virus is out before the signatures are.
There has been a very large outbreak here, inside the firewall this morning.. This is probably the largest that I can remember, since we do not use Outlook/Outlook express we seem to dodge the big ones. I didn't even think this looked that bad at first glance, it doesn't really try to exploit any security holes to infect the machine. What got us was that the virus scanners were just old enough not to catch this until it was too late. All it really took was one or two people opening the attachment. The new engine didn't get pushed until at least an hour after the first internal case was discovered. By then though, it had spread so quickly that many other hosts had been infected.