I was unfortunate enough to subjected to Borland JBuilder whilst making the mistake of taking the Introduction to Programming module at the Computer Science department at Durham University in late 2000, and it was the worst piece of commercial software I have ever witnessed. It had a minimum recommended spec of 128MB of ram (this was nearly five years ago), or 256MB if you had it, and even then, doing simple stuff like selecting something from the menus could lock your machine up for minutes.
When I joined the course we were just using javac and a text editor of our choice, but a couple of weeks later they had to go and force us to switch to that, and to hand in our work in a JBuilder format. The slowness did make sense; apparently they had just rewritten the whole thing so that it was in Java itself, and this was 4-5 years ago, so of course it was going to be slow.
The software was so completely irritating and impossible to use that I decided it was more than my university career was worth and dropped out of university with nothing at the end of first year - which has now turned out to be one of the best career moves I've ever made. Thanks, Borland! My thoughts go out to any poor sod forced to use it.
"...Let's see if the Linux community can match his generosity."
But as there aren't quite as many Linux users as there are Windows users out there, it'd only be fair to expect us to raise an amount proportional to the $750M raised by the Windows users.
Iceland plans to become the first oil-free country by 2050.
Best of luck to them: lots of people out there are saying that we're going to reach peak oil (the point at which supply of oil can no longer meet demand) much sooner - in which case, Iceland and, well, every other country won't have any choice but to be almost entirely oil free by 2050.
If only every country was at least this forward thinking and we didn't all take energy for granted.
Here's a few references: 12345 or just Google for peak oil.
Mozilla is fantastic. It's a serious boost to my career - I install it (or Firefox) daily for many customers as part of a solution that makes their computer(s) significantly more secure, and there is practically never an unsatisfied customer. I'm hoping I'll be able to pass on some of the income to the Mozilla Foundation this year.
Here's a few gripes I've had with Mozilla over the past five years that don't seem to have been mentioned elsewhere - or fixed, either:
Some of the defaults in Mozilla are crazy. Who doesn't want to block popups? Who wants the same 'plaintext is unsecure' warning every time they click a submit button? These have been corrected in Firefox but are still the same in the Mozilla suite. Before switching over to Firefox for most purposes, I had to spend time training my staff about all the default options that needed changing in Mozilla regardless of who we were installing it for.
Still on the subject of defaults, why is the 'Classic' theme still the default in Mozilla when it also ships with 'Modern'? So many people look at that and just go "Ugh... Netscape" before I've had chance to change it and restart the browser, and then I have to spend another five minutes reconvincing them that they really do want to give this 'Netscape-thing' a[nother] chance. Yes, I know it's not Netscape. They don't.
The one, most annoying usability-issue about Mozilla which even IE gets right: when you enter an incorrect URL such as slashdot.ogr and hit enter, before you can correct it, an irritating 'OK' box appears in the middle of the screen saying site could not be found.... This necessities having to either (1) Stop whatever you were about to click on with the mouse to click on this small Ok box in the middle of the screen, or (2) Press Enter with the keyboard but then still have to use the mouse to click back into the address bar just to retype that URL. Microsoft ended this backward behaviour in Internet Explorer years ago by just changing the content of the display in the browser to 'Page cannot be found', and it's still easily possible to correct the address bar without reaching for the mouse. I'm really surprised the Mozilla people haven't made this minute change yet and would love to see it done.
Flash and Java plugins installation: fair enough, Mozilla can't ship with Flash and Java because of licensing problems and lack of source code availability - two good reasons. But for the 98% of users who will then want to have Flash and Java installed (whether they knew this at the time of installation or not) and who aren't lucky/loaded enough to have computer-geeks on standby who can deal with this kind of crap for them, plugin installation is far too hard. Mozilla should make us aware of this lack-of-plugins-in-the-default-install situation right at the start, possibly by mentioning it on the Mozilla start page, and should then have nice text saying "To install the Flash plugin, click here. To install the Java plugin, click here. To install the Acrobat plugin...", and so on, with extremely simple (2-3 clicks at most) installation methods. Yes, I know to carry around Flash and Java with me, but until it really is that simple, Flash not working or just displaying 'Click here to download the plugin', where clicking here actually just leads to confusion and more clicks (as it does right now: "Sorry, no appropriate plugin found, even though it was Java you wanted... I guess you'll just have to do without"), lots of users are going to go back to IE, which is surely not in any of our interests.
If you click a link but it hasn't loaded yet, and you change your mind and click 'stop', Mozilla very often wipes out the current page you were still reading and replaces it with a blank screen, which is even less useful than just ignoring the stop request and displaying the new page anyway. I'd really like to see this modifies so that clicking stop always either loads the n
I'll no doubt get modded down to a (-1, Flamebait) for daring to suggest that the future may not be as rosy as we all wish, but have the relevant people taken peak oil into consideration when making such plans? It just seems a little ill thought out to be building new roads on such a scale if they aren't going to be of much use in another 15-20 years time.
In my experience, if you're good, and people pick up on that, it almost always pays off.
On the note of a stable income and job security: although things might not be fantastic at first, eventually, in my opinion, contracting can be much more secure than full time employment. Instead of having all of your eggs in one basket and relying on one organisation for all your income, you'll instead likely end up with your income spread across many sources, making it much easier and less of a problem to switch to another source of income when one drops you.
Also (not mentioned on Slashdot very often in such topics) is that really useful and common sense concept known as... saving. One is going to worry a lot more about not having work if they didn't have the sense to save up a few thousand before going freelance. I'm sure you'll have no doubt taken that one into account but it seems that the idea never occurs to others.
And on a fairly unrelated, much more personal and none-of-my-business note (but maybe worth mentioning while there's still time), there's a lot to be said for not having kids.
I run a small IT company supporting customers on-site to help them with their computers, and spyware is now a new source of income for us. It very often just takes a quick look in the process list or a double click on the IE icon.
But avoiding spyware on the whole is very simple, and comes down to a few simple steps, based on prevention is better than cure, i.e. it's better not to get something bad at all, than to get something bad and then have to get rid of it.
Make sure their computers are behind some kind of hardware or software firewall which blocks all incoming TCP connection requests. Yes, there is more to it, but this one step is a huge improvement on not having a firewall.
Install another browser such as Mozilla Firefox, and show them how to use it. Only use Internet Explorer for specific sites that you trust, if it has to be used at all. Remember that many users need Flash and Java, so consider installing these as well to stop them going back to IE as soon as they hit a site requiring one or the other.
Spend a few minutes educating your users about malicious software. Explain that a computer simply follows instructions with little concept of good or bad, and that it only takes a double click on one file containing such instructions (eg a.exe file) to contaminate the system.
Yes, there's more: software updates, strong passwords, encryption, using more secure software and all the rest of it. Unfortunately most of our users aren't interested in becoming computer security experts. If you can get those three above points hammered in, and let them know that that there is more to securing their computer, you're making a big step in the right direction.
This is technically offtopic, but often much of the 'slowness' we still experience on our computers which people often blame on their 'operating system' isn't really down to the operating system (i.e. kernel), but more the higher level stuff that runs on top of it. It seems that lots of efforts are going into making operating systems more efficient, since there's lots of interest in this area, but that efficiency is more than lost further up. (Not that I should be complaining, since I'm just another person not doing anything about it.)
Try running Windows NT on a new Intel system (say 2-3GHz) for example - it'll run blazingly fast, and with software versions from around the same time it'll still do much of what everyone wants to do - email, web, office, graphics manipulation - but really much faster - things will load practically instantly, rather than after five or ten seconds, and it's all still nice and graphical and everything, just like people want.
Many (but not all) XP machines I meet still seem to take 2-10 seconds even to do basic things such as open My Computer, Internet Explorer or a properties dialog, which one has to wonder is worth the wait for the extra functionality - basically lots of drivers, a couple of extra bundled programs and supported file formats, minor changes to the interface and the other couple of things I'll get flamed for forgetting. Microsoft have no doubt made some improvements to the kernel between releasing NT and releasing XP, but most still seem to be no faster to use, if not slower.
I maintained a school network up until last year which still ran NT and KDE2 on around 2/3 of systems, and then when my replacement went and wiped everything out and replaced it with new machines running XP (with an enormous cost to them), many staff told me that there were lots of things that didn't work any more, and there'd be frequent outages of the entire network.
On a Linux+X system, running X on its own (i.e. just the one program you want) or with a light window manager (fvwm or whatever) is again noticeably faster than running Gnome or KDE. Loading Mozilla or OpenOffice.org means loading the entire frameworks they run in, and often we're loading up a great deal of functionality we don't want in that particular situation. I think a good example is Dillo, a web browser written entirely in C that just does the basics (launches in around 0.7 seconds on this Athlon 700 system, compared to Mozilla, which takes around 5, and Mozilla Firefox, which isn't far off that) - it'd be interesting to see if they could add things like CSS or SSL support and still keep it fast.
It gets difficult here doesn't it; you soon find out that many dozen people are your "friend" when you can make all their IT work for them, and while you'll be happy to help some of them for free, where do you draw the line? Parents and siblings only? Relatives? Relatives and people you've know a long time? (Etc...)
Two solutions I can suggest where you don't want to just ask for money are:
(1) Get your friends to agree to a favour in return, whether that's something they're good at (such as DIY), keeping you in alcohol for an evening, or whatever, or:
(2) (better!) Simply tell them that although you want to help them, you just simple don't have time to help all 108 people you know who want you to sort their IT out for them. They'll keep pestering at you for a while, so you'll need to hold out a bit, but you'll usually find that they'll given in and go "Look, how about if I just *pay* you?"
I do this for a living now, except for businesses. (Domestic stuff just isn't worth it; they're constant whingers, f*ck up everything no end as soon as you've left the house and blame you for it, nag you for phone support for months afterwards, and expect to pay sod all anyway.)
I work six or seven days per week, and simply say that although I'd like to help them, any time spent helping them is time spent not earning money, and by the time I've earned enough money for any given week, the last thing I want to do is look at someone elses computer screen. When you put it to them from that point of view, it's entirely reasonable that they either cough up or do without, since otherwise they see that they're doing you out of your income.
Very useful - will be taking a long look at that. Thanks!
Re:never-been-rooted claims getting sillier
on
OpenBSD 3.5 Released
·
· Score: 1
Actually, there's evidence to suggest otherwise: it appears that they're incrementing it at a rate of more than one per year.
If we look now, in 2004, they claim "Only remote hole in the default install, in more than 8 years!" However, if we use the wayback machine to look back three years ago to 2001, they then only claimed to have three years.
All the same, I find that OpenBSD is fantastic: well documented, simple, very paranoid about security, and very easy to update.
Sorry to disagree here, but I see something majorly wrong with these estimates.
Every time they make a computer, it generates lots of times' that computers' weight in crap. You go through a load of clean water, you burn lots of fossil fuels, you create lots of packaging that'll probably never be re-used, and more. Hundreds of kilograms by some estimates.
And because Longhorn will require such a computer, that will mean that practically all the computers around today will be useless for anyone who wants to run the latest version of Windows. So this will massively contribute to an already significant problem of the 'computer mountains' that are starting to appear alongside the fridge mountains.
And okay, maybe in fifty years, it won't matter that we've used all these resources up so pointlessly. What about in 100 years, or 500 years? Aren't people then going to be a little pissed off at us at the mess we've left them?
This is a great idea, but there's not a great deal on there. I've been making up CDs full of free and open source Windows software for a couple of years now, which (along with Knoppix and Toms) prove to be extremely useful. Here's just some of what's on there (note that some of the links don't actually point to the Windows version of that software; you might need to dig around a bit):
Popups seem to have got themselves the same respect/FUD as computer viruses these days - hasn't anyone even on Slashdot stopped just for a minute to think about how they actually work?
It's very simple. Popups don't force their way into your computer; rather, your computer chooses to display them. This usually happens when your web browser downloads the source code for a web page, and that code contains a request that says: Please open a new browser window on the user's desktop. It's then up to the web browser to actually go ahead and display that popup.
They work in the same way as nearly all viruses: rather than force their way into a computer, your computer merely chooses to execute a set of instructions - although there are exceptions here, as some viruses exploit security holes to 'trick' their way in, which is why we employ other mechanisms such as using a firewall to block all incoming connection requests to make their job harder for them.
The real solution to popups is quite simple, and it's based on prevention is better than cure. Rather than allowing your computer choose to display a popup, and then putting effort into finding ways to "block" it, simply have your computer not open them in the first place.
Don't believe me? Fine - try a text based browser - something that doesn't even know about window systems, such as lynx, or links. Perhaps try running it on a system that doesn't even have a windowing system installed and just has one virtual console running. You should then find that most websites have a pretty hard time opening any popup windows on your 80x25 text-based screen!
Okay, fine, using text-based browsers isn't exactly an ideal solution to anyone, but it does prove the point that by far the most reliable way to "block" popups is to simply use a browser that has no knowledge of how to open anything other than it's main window on your system. Since there are already several Free Software / Open Source web browser implementations out there, there's nothing stopping anyone with plenty of time on their hands from going through and removing all such code.
I unfortunately don't have the time or the necessary C++ skills (most of them seem to be written in C++, rather than C) to do this, and so I find that using Mozilla 1.6 (or later) and selecting Edit - Preferences - Privacy & Security - Popup Windows and ticking the Block unrequested popup windows box is good enough. It's interesting to note that sometimes clicking on a link will cause a web page to open itself in a new window, but the advertisers don't seem to have managed to exploit this so far.
Just FYI: I used Partimage on a 130-computer school network, where all machines were NTFS and ran either Windows NT or 2000, and it was always successful. so I recommend giving it a go. Kernel was my own compiled 2.4.18. 2.6.0 is stable write support too. Mail me if I can help.
I've often wondered if this could be done with Windows - if one could make a (perhaps large) Windows executable that, when you double click on it, assimilates your system and turns it into a Linux box. (Which could in turn provide the depenguinators with lots more machines to work on.)
Win9x should be more straight forward - you can boot a linux kernel directly from a real DOS prompt using loadlin (although this may not be necessary), and it's possible to have the whole root filesystem stored in one file on a FAT32 filesystem, so the.exe could create the root filesystem (maybe something like a base debian or gentoo install), put everything in place, change how the machine boots, and restart.
The submitter said: "or at least make it mandatory to for-profit organizations to give a certain minimum amount and take it out of their taxes?"
If things went this far, it wouldn't be free software any more. Whether we like it or not, part of the freedom of free software is to be able to do things exactly like this; to be able to take the software and not give anything back. It's because of a lack of such restrictions that OSS/FS has been so successful.
Besides, companies may give in other ways. They may use free software, but give to, say, a charity to help fight against AIDS, or to feed the homeless, or to reduce global warming; causes that many would argue are more important than free software.
I hope they hire some pretty good security - and choose a highly secure location when they make the transaction, or someone might have a really bad day!
Haven't they realised that there are other ways of transferring such large quantities of money around??
Slashdot Mirror
Here's another.
I was unfortunate enough to subjected to Borland JBuilder whilst making the mistake of taking the Introduction to Programming module at the Computer Science department at Durham University in late 2000, and it was the worst piece of commercial software I have ever witnessed. It had a minimum recommended spec of 128MB of ram (this was nearly five years ago), or 256MB if you had it, and even then, doing simple stuff like selecting something from the menus could lock your machine up for minutes.
When I joined the course we were just using javac and a text editor of our choice, but a couple of weeks later they had to go and force us to switch to that, and to hand in our work in a JBuilder format. The slowness did make sense; apparently they had just rewritten the whole thing so that it was in Java itself, and this was 4-5 years ago, so of course it was going to be slow.
The software was so completely irritating and impossible to use that I decided it was more than my university career was worth and dropped out of university with nothing at the end of first year - which has now turned out to be one of the best career moves I've ever made. Thanks, Borland! My thoughts go out to any poor sod forced to use it.
Is there an increased risk of them bumping into things, like Space Debris?
OnSpeed have already been providing such a service in the UK and other countries for a while.
You can get realtime info for British trains on the Internet here: www.nationalrail.co.uk.
The original poster says:
"...Let's see if the Linux community can match his generosity."
But as there aren't quite as many Linux users as there are Windows users out there, it'd only be fair to expect us to raise an amount proportional to the $750M raised by the Windows users.
Iceland plans to become the first oil-free country by 2050.
Best of luck to them: lots of people out there are saying that we're going to reach peak oil (the point at which supply of oil can no longer meet demand) much sooner - in which case, Iceland and, well, every other country won't have any choice but to be almost entirely oil free by 2050.
If only every country was at least this forward thinking and we didn't all take energy for granted.
Here's a few references: 1 2 3 4 5 or just Google for peak oil.
Here's a few gripes I've had with Mozilla over the past five years that don't seem to have been mentioned elsewhere - or fixed, either:
Some of the defaults in Mozilla are crazy. Who doesn't want to block popups? Who wants the same 'plaintext is unsecure' warning every time they click a submit button? These have been corrected in Firefox but are still the same in the Mozilla suite. Before switching over to Firefox for most purposes, I had to spend time training my staff about all the default options that needed changing in Mozilla regardless of who we were installing it for.
Still on the subject of defaults, why is the 'Classic' theme still the default in Mozilla when it also ships with 'Modern'? So many people look at that and just go "Ugh... Netscape" before I've had chance to change it and restart the browser, and then I have to spend another five minutes reconvincing them that they really do want to give this 'Netscape-thing' a[nother] chance. Yes, I know it's not Netscape. They don't.
The one, most annoying usability-issue about Mozilla which even IE gets right: when you enter an incorrect URL such as slashdot.ogr and hit enter, before you can correct it, an irritating 'OK' box appears in the middle of the screen saying site could not be found.... This necessities having to either (1) Stop whatever you were about to click on with the mouse to click on this small Ok box in the middle of the screen, or (2) Press Enter with the keyboard but then still have to use the mouse to click back into the address bar just to retype that URL. Microsoft ended this backward behaviour in Internet Explorer years ago by just changing the content of the display in the browser to 'Page cannot be found', and it's still easily possible to correct the address bar without reaching for the mouse. I'm really surprised the Mozilla people haven't made this minute change yet and would love to see it done.
Flash and Java plugins installation: fair enough, Mozilla can't ship with Flash and Java because of licensing problems and lack of source code availability - two good reasons. But for the 98% of users who will then want to have Flash and Java installed (whether they knew this at the time of installation or not) and who aren't lucky/loaded enough to have computer-geeks on standby who can deal with this kind of crap for them, plugin installation is far too hard. Mozilla should make us aware of this lack-of-plugins-in-the-default-install situation right at the start, possibly by mentioning it on the Mozilla start page, and should then have nice text saying "To install the Flash plugin, click here. To install the Java plugin, click here. To install the Acrobat plugin...", and so on, with extremely simple (2-3 clicks at most) installation methods. Yes, I know to carry around Flash and Java with me, but until it really is that simple, Flash not working or just displaying 'Click here to download the plugin', where clicking here actually just leads to confusion and more clicks (as it does right now: "Sorry, no appropriate plugin found, even though it was Java you wanted... I guess you'll just have to do without"), lots of users are going to go back to IE, which is surely not in any of our interests.
If you click a link but it hasn't loaded yet, and you change your mind and click 'stop', Mozilla very often wipes out the current page you were still reading and replaces it with a blank screen, which is even less useful than just ignoring the stop request and displaying the new page anyway. I'd really like to see this modifies so that clicking stop always either loads the n
I'll no doubt get modded down to a (-1, Flamebait) for daring to suggest that the future may not be as rosy as we all wish, but have the relevant people taken peak oil into consideration when making such plans? It just seems a little ill thought out to be building new roads on such a scale if they aren't going to be of much use in another 15-20 years time.
See 1 2 3 4 5 or just Google for peak oil.
In my experience, if you're good, and people pick up on that, it almost always pays off.
On the note of a stable income and job security: although things might not be fantastic at first, eventually, in my opinion, contracting can be much more secure than full time employment. Instead of having all of your eggs in one basket and relying on one organisation for all your income, you'll instead likely end up with your income spread across many sources, making it much easier and less of a problem to switch to another source of income when one drops you.
Also (not mentioned on Slashdot very often in such topics) is that really useful and common sense concept known as... saving. One is going to worry a lot more about not having work if they didn't have the sense to save up a few thousand before going freelance. I'm sure you'll have no doubt taken that one into account but it seems that the idea never occurs to others.
And on a fairly unrelated, much more personal and none-of-my-business note (but maybe worth mentioning while there's still time), there's a lot to be said for not having kids.
Good luck with it!
But avoiding spyware on the whole is very simple, and comes down to a few simple steps, based on prevention is better than cure, i.e. it's better not to get something bad at all, than to get something bad and then have to get rid of it.
Make sure their computers are behind some kind of hardware or software firewall which blocks all incoming TCP connection requests. Yes, there is more to it, but this one step is a huge improvement on not having a firewall.
Install another browser such as Mozilla Firefox, and show them how to use it. Only use Internet Explorer for specific sites that you trust, if it has to be used at all. Remember that many users need Flash and Java, so consider installing these as well to stop them going back to IE as soon as they hit a site requiring one or the other.
Spend a few minutes educating your users about malicious software. Explain that a computer simply follows instructions with little concept of good or bad, and that it only takes a double click on one file containing such instructions (eg a .exe file) to contaminate the system.
Yes, there's more: software updates, strong passwords, encryption, using more secure software and all the rest of it. Unfortunately most of our users aren't interested in becoming computer security experts. If you can get those three above points hammered in, and let them know that that there is more to securing their computer, you're making a big step in the right direction.
According to the article scramjet-powered missiles and aircraft could be in mass production as early as 2010.
That's great! Pity we'll probably be running out of oil to power these things by then.
Wow - I never knew before reading this article that Microsoft's Visual C++ Compiler is now free. (Free as in 'beer' of course.)
This is technically offtopic, but often much of the 'slowness' we still experience on our computers which people often blame on their 'operating system' isn't really down to the operating system (i.e. kernel), but more the higher level stuff that runs on top of it. It seems that lots of efforts are going into making operating systems more efficient, since there's lots of interest in this area, but that efficiency is more than lost further up. (Not that I should be complaining, since I'm just another person not doing anything about it.)
Try running Windows NT on a new Intel system (say 2-3GHz) for example - it'll run blazingly fast, and with software versions from around the same time it'll still do much of what everyone wants to do - email, web, office, graphics manipulation - but really much faster - things will load practically instantly, rather than after five or ten seconds, and it's all still nice and graphical and everything, just like people want.
Many (but not all) XP machines I meet still seem to take 2-10 seconds even to do basic things such as open My Computer, Internet Explorer or a properties dialog, which one has to wonder is worth the wait for the extra functionality - basically lots of drivers, a couple of extra bundled programs and supported file formats, minor changes to the interface and the other couple of things I'll get flamed for forgetting. Microsoft have no doubt made some improvements to the kernel between releasing NT and releasing XP, but most still seem to be no faster to use, if not slower.
I maintained a school network up until last year which still ran NT and KDE2 on around 2/3 of systems, and then when my replacement went and wiped everything out and replaced it with new machines running XP (with an enormous cost to them), many staff told me that there were lots of things that didn't work any more, and there'd be frequent outages of the entire network.
On a Linux+X system, running X on its own (i.e. just the one program you want) or with a light window manager (fvwm or whatever) is again noticeably faster than running Gnome or KDE. Loading Mozilla or OpenOffice.org means loading the entire frameworks they run in, and often we're loading up a great deal of functionality we don't want in that particular situation. I think a good example is Dillo, a web browser written entirely in C that just does the basics (launches in around 0.7 seconds on this Athlon 700 system, compared to Mozilla, which takes around 5, and Mozilla Firefox, which isn't far off that) - it'd be interesting to see if they could add things like CSS or SSL support and still keep it fast.
It gets difficult here doesn't it; you soon find out that many dozen people are your "friend" when you can make all their IT work for them, and while you'll be happy to help some of them for free, where do you draw the line? Parents and siblings only? Relatives? Relatives and people you've know a long time? (Etc...)
Two solutions I can suggest where you don't want to just ask for money are:
(1) Get your friends to agree to a favour in return, whether that's something they're good at (such as DIY), keeping you in alcohol for an evening, or whatever, or:
(2) (better!) Simply tell them that although you want to help them, you just simple don't have time to help all 108 people you know who want you to sort their IT out for them. They'll keep pestering at you for a while, so you'll need to hold out a bit, but you'll usually find that they'll given in and go "Look, how about if I just *pay* you?"
I do this for a living now, except for businesses. (Domestic stuff just isn't worth it; they're constant whingers, f*ck up everything no end as soon as you've left the house and blame you for it, nag you for phone support for months afterwards, and expect to pay sod all anyway.)
I work six or seven days per week, and simply say that although I'd like to help them, any time spent helping them is time spent not earning money, and by the time I've earned enough money for any given week, the last thing I want to do is look at someone elses computer screen. When you put it to them from that point of view, it's entirely reasonable that they either cough up or do without, since otherwise they see that they're doing you out of your income.
Very useful - will be taking a long look at that. Thanks!
Actually, there's evidence to suggest otherwise: it appears that they're incrementing it at a rate of more than one per year.
If we look now, in 2004, they claim "Only remote hole in the default install, in more than 8 years!" However, if we use the wayback machine to look back three years ago to 2001, they then only claimed to have three years.
All the same, I find that OpenBSD is fantastic: well documented, simple, very paranoid about security, and very easy to update.
Sorry to disagree here, but I see something majorly wrong with these estimates.
Every time they make a computer, it generates lots of times' that computers' weight in crap. You go through a load of clean water, you burn lots of fossil fuels, you create lots of packaging that'll probably never be re-used, and more. Hundreds of kilograms by some estimates.
And because Longhorn will require such a computer, that will mean that practically all the computers around today will be useless for anyone who wants to run the latest version of Windows. So this will massively contribute to an already significant problem of the 'computer mountains' that are starting to appear alongside the fridge mountains.
And okay, maybe in fifty years, it won't matter that we've used all these resources up so pointlessly. What about in 100 years, or 500 years? Aren't people then going to be a little pissed off at us at the mess we've left them?
Popups seem to have got themselves the same respect/FUD as computer viruses these days - hasn't anyone even on Slashdot stopped just for a minute to think about how they actually work?
It's very simple. Popups don't force their way into your computer; rather, your computer chooses to display them. This usually happens when your web browser downloads the source code for a web page, and that code contains a request that says: Please open a new browser window on the user's desktop. It's then up to the web browser to actually go ahead and display that popup.
They work in the same way as nearly all viruses: rather than force their way into a computer, your computer merely chooses to execute a set of instructions - although there are exceptions here, as some viruses exploit security holes to 'trick' their way in, which is why we employ other mechanisms such as using a firewall to block all incoming connection requests to make their job harder for them.
The real solution to popups is quite simple, and it's based on prevention is better than cure. Rather than allowing your computer choose to display a popup, and then putting effort into finding ways to "block" it, simply have your computer not open them in the first place.
Don't believe me? Fine - try a text based browser - something that doesn't even know about window systems, such as lynx, or links. Perhaps try running it on a system that doesn't even have a windowing system installed and just has one virtual console running. You should then find that most websites have a pretty hard time opening any popup windows on your 80x25 text-based screen!
Okay, fine, using text-based browsers isn't exactly an ideal solution to anyone, but it does prove the point that by far the most reliable way to "block" popups is to simply use a browser that has no knowledge of how to open anything other than it's main window on your system. Since there are already several Free Software / Open Source web browser implementations out there, there's nothing stopping anyone with plenty of time on their hands from going through and removing all such code.
I unfortunately don't have the time or the necessary C++ skills (most of them seem to be written in C++, rather than C) to do this, and so I find that using Mozilla 1.6 (or later) and selecting Edit - Preferences - Privacy & Security - Popup Windows and ticking the Block unrequested popup windows box is good enough. It's interesting to note that sometimes clicking on a link will cause a web page to open itself in a new window, but the advertisers don't seem to have managed to exploit this so far.
Hang on... are you telling me that Microsoft at some point do support their operating systems?
My god... I hope my customers don't get to find out about this... I'll be out of a job!
Just FYI: I used Partimage on a 130-computer school network, where all machines were NTFS and ran either Windows NT or 2000, and it was always successful. so I recommend giving it a go. Kernel was my own compiled 2.4.18. 2.6.0 is stable write support too. Mail me if I can help.
I've often wondered if this could be done with Windows - if one could make a (perhaps large) Windows executable that, when you double click on it, assimilates your system and turns it into a Linux box. (Which could in turn provide the depenguinators with lots more machines to work on.)
.exe could create the root filesystem (maybe something like a base debian or gentoo install), put everything in place, change how the machine boots, and restart.
Win9x should be more straight forward - you can boot a linux kernel directly from a real DOS prompt using loadlin (although this may not be necessary), and it's possible to have the whole root filesystem stored in one file on a FAT32 filesystem, so the
The submitter said: "or at least make it mandatory to for-profit organizations to give a certain minimum amount and take it out of their taxes?"
If things went this far, it wouldn't be free software any more. Whether we like it or not, part of the freedom of free software is to be able to do things exactly like this; to be able to take the software and not give anything back. It's because of a lack of such restrictions that OSS/FS has been so successful.
Besides, companies may give in other ways. They may use free software, but give to, say, a charity to help fight against AIDS, or to feed the homeless, or to reduce global warming; causes that many would argue are more important than free software.
They're going to pay $635 million in cash?
I hope they hire some pretty good security - and choose a highly secure location when they make the transaction, or someone might have a really bad day!
Haven't they realised that there are other ways of transferring such large quantities of money around??