Our local rock station announced they were switching to being a country station one april1 many years ago.. they got a much bigger and angrier response than they ever expected, and haven't dared repeat the prank since!
Or the company could hire a programmer or two full-time to add features to open-source projects that are 'almost, but not quite' exactly what they need, for less money than it would cost to keep the company on the Microsoft Upgrade Treadmill.
And they can -optionally- contribute those changes back to the community, gaining the company some goodwill amongst the OSS community without effectively having cost them a cent.
Internet (ADSL) firewalled by a FreeBSD server. Linux could do the same job. I also have spamassassin+amavis+clamav scanning my mail, and I keep all my files on a samba share, which is backed up to another server via a cron job.
The only two windows machines on my network are actually my kids games machines (Windows, because there's very little good educational software for Linux yet!)
I've replaced Outlook and Internet Explorer with FireFox and ThunderBird. I've also got open-office installed. Original files, drivers, and games CD's are all on the Samba server. Anything they type up or scan in gets saved on the Samba server. If anything weird happens to the Windows boxes, I simply nuke-and-pave.
I haven't had any problems with Viruses or anything yet, but the kids don't tend to download stuff or share their email addresses too widely.
. Save to file . Set executable (chmod +x) . Execute (and by default it's not in your path either!)
BUT when Linux gets as popular as Windows, most users are likely to be running something broken like Lindows that does everything as root. And sooner or later someone _will_ write a mail client for Lindows that can automagically run executable attachments because the sort of people who send greeting cards and flash jokes to each other will _ask_ for that functionality.
Linux/freeBSD are safe because they're not generally run by morons; Windows is perfectly safe as long as you know what you're doing. Have a good firewall, replace IE/OE with TB/FF or Moz, be a little careful about what you download, and NEVER run stuff that gets mailed to you! Plus keep backups and be prepared to nuke-and-pave if necessary.
Blocking referer is damned annoying, as a web designer I WANT to know where all my hits are coming from.
I think a bit of PHP scripting might be in order, before this madness gets out of hand..
BTW; If you're interested in what browser people are using, I recommend using IE conditional comments. From my logs almost a quarter of browsers that identify themselves as MSIE are actually something else, probably Mozilla or Opera, because they don't recognise the conditional comments like a real MSIE would.
Actually, I'd be very interested in how Microsoft decide to differentiate themselves in terms of a search product. Obviously, sinking this much money into a completely different search means they must have some sort of strategy for toppling Google off the throne, right ? That's what I want to see.
Microsoft's usual strategy; make <msfoo> the default <foo> in windows, and make it just good enough that most <foo> users won't go to the trouble of downloading <alterfoo>. When <alterfoo> goes out of business, stop maintaining <msfoo> apart from the most egrarious bugfixes.
It's been working for them since MSFT first started. Why would they change the strategy now?
In this case; get users used to searching from the toolbar, and make changing the default search in IE impractical for most users (it requires a registry hack or download). Most Windows users I know still have xtramsn.co.nz (local version of msn.com) or their ISP's default as their homepage; it's never occured to them to change it.
However Microsoft slightly misjudged how easy it is to bookmark a better search engine, and how much suckyness their own search engine could get away with. They'll make MSN search suck slightly less, reset everyone's search settings and homepage in the next 'update', and everything should be back on track again.
There's a big difference between "text to speech" and a screen reader. Blind users need to hear windows titles, error messages, menu text, etc. Try unplugging your monitor and see how far you can get with MS's inbuilt text to speech. It's hard enough even with a proper screen reader, completely impossible with "cut-and-paste" TTS.
BTW; I recommend downloading the trial version of JAWS and seeing how much you can do. It takes a lot of getting used to! Don't cheat, leave the monitor OFF.
More significantly, ENOTTY,/dev/tty*, the BELL character (0x07), etc all refer to the golfball or dot-matrix "teletype" machines that used to be the standard way of using a computer. Later these were replaced with CRT terminals such as the VT100, VT220, Wyse160, etc.
I'm not sure how many/.ers ever used a terminal, but I expect very few ever used a teletype.
Software insurance doesn't 'fix' the bugs, but you have the source code so it could cover paying a programmer who can fix it. It can also cover the cost of your business being closed three days while you restore all the backups, the cost of having to re-enter data after it got corrupted, legal fees you encounter when a bunch of people's payment details end up on a website somewhere.
OSS doesn't give you this, but neither does Microsoft.At least with OSS you have the option of paying for it.
What does Microsoft give you? They'll refund the price of the CD, and no more. If Microsoft decides that a bug isn't worth fixing, you are SOL. If you lose data, or get sued, or whatever, Microsoft _might_ refund the $300 or whatever per copy that you payed for the CD. Or they might decide that it's not their fault at all and you have to sue them to get even that. For everything else, you are SOL.
Don't believe me? Pull up the EULA for any Microsoft product, and scroll down to he last clause. It's completely unambiguous, all in capital letters, and it's usually also the only clause in the whole EULA that gets repeated in French and Spanish. Microsoft it quite clear on this, argue liability in court and you WILL lose.
Yeah, but it worked:) I didn't know about xfce4 before..
Also; the comment was made that the 'default redhat install' is what most new Linux users will be starting with. It needs to be no bigger or slower (by default!) than whatever Redmond is shipping at the time. I'd prefer it was significantly leaner.
Optional extras are fine, but slim down the default a little!
For disinfecting your desk (or hands) in a safe manner nothing really beats vodka or other high proof, food grade alcohol, but the moralists and politicians have made that an over pricey proposition.
"Oh don't give me none more of that Old Janx Spirit/ No, don't you give me none more of that Old Janx Spirit/ For my head will fly, my tongue will lie, my eyes will fry and I may die/ Won't you pour me one more of that sinful Old Janx Spirit"
TCP is NOT flawed. Sure you can spoof a packet or two, but (assuming reasonably strong sequence numbers) you can't fake a whole connection unless you are actually getting the reply packets.
mail is likewise not flawed; It is fairly hard to find an open relay these days; it is all-but-impossible to find one that doesn't put your IP address in the headers. That's your _REAL_ ip address. The one that ends up in RBL's so nobody accepts your mail any more.
The big flaw is home users; they keep getting pwn3d. And you can't even blame Microsoft for this any more. The viruses are arriving as a zipped, passworded attachment FFS. We've long since passed the realm of just clicking on an executable!
Here's how I see it; the antispam community were on the right track from the beginning. Blacklisting has made it impossible for spammers to spam from their OWN connections, even overseas, and pushed them to finding home users (to spam from, or to attack the blacklist sites). Now they're talking about changing the entire mail system, persuade thousands of users to change the way they do email? Hell no, we've almost won. We just need to educate enough END USERS not to get pwn3d, with the result that the DDoS attacks get cut down and the remaining much smaller number of spam sources can be more efficiently blacklisted.
Or we can force one more 'wafer thin' kludge onto the entire mail system, which the spammers will just find a way around next week anyhow.
Windows 2000 and XP both have an inbuilt firewall, which is (pure genius!) off by default.
It's also bloody hard to configure. Most p2p apps recommend switching it off, because nobody can ever figure out how to open just one or two ports, but it does the job. Switching windows inbuilt firewall on BEFORE you dial up the internet will protect you well enough that you can go download a real firewall, virus scanner, and/or all the latest patches from MSFT.
Although it's not spyware (afaik) many of those 'copy protected' CD's do install software without warning, for the sole purpose of interfering with the normal operation of the computer.
How the hell is this _NOT_ illegal already?!!
And why is nobody being prosecuted for it? There's no shortage of hard evidence.
Slashdot Mirror
Our local rock station announced they were switching to being a country station one april1 many years ago.. they got a much bigger and angrier response than they ever expected, and haven't dared repeat the prank since!
Or the company could hire a programmer or two full-time to add features to open-source projects that are 'almost, but not quite' exactly what they need, for less money than it would cost to keep the company on the Microsoft Upgrade Treadmill.
And they can -optionally- contribute those changes back to the community, gaining the company some goodwill amongst the OSS community without effectively having cost them a cent.
Internet (ADSL) firewalled by a FreeBSD server. Linux could do the same job. I also have spamassassin+amavis+clamav scanning my mail, and I keep all my files on a samba share, which is backed up to another server via a cron job.
The only two windows machines on my network are actually my kids games machines (Windows, because there's very little good educational software for Linux yet!)
I've replaced Outlook and Internet Explorer with FireFox and ThunderBird. I've also got open-office installed. Original files, drivers, and games CD's are all on the Samba server. Anything they type up or scan in gets saved on the Samba server. If anything weird happens to the Windows boxes, I simply nuke-and-pave.
I haven't had any problems with Viruses or anything yet, but the kids don't tend to download stuff or share their email addresses too widely.
The time when we need in excess of 640 GB or RAM will be closer than you think. I give it 5 years absolute tops. Probably less.
:)
Depends on how early they get Longhorn out the door, I guess
It's not fud.
I'd like to think it was pessimisim, but I fear it might be realisim.
Mozilla, Firefox, Evolution, Opera, Pegasus, hell even PINE, can all do this. What the hell email client doesnt?!!
You missed a step;
. Save to file
. Set executable (chmod +x)
. Execute (and by default it's not in your path either!)
BUT when Linux gets as popular as Windows, most users are likely to be running something broken like Lindows that does everything as root. And sooner or later someone _will_ write a mail client for Lindows that can automagically run executable attachments because the sort of people who send greeting cards and flash jokes to each other will _ask_ for that functionality.
Linux/freeBSD are safe because they're not generally run by morons; Windows is perfectly safe as long as you know what you're doing. Have a good firewall, replace IE/OE with TB/FF or Moz, be a little careful about what you download, and NEVER run stuff that gets mailed to you! Plus keep backups and be prepared to nuke-and-pave if necessary.
Blocking referer is damned annoying, as a web designer I WANT to know where all my hits are coming from.
I think a bit of PHP scripting might be in order, before this madness gets out of hand..
BTW; If you're interested in what browser people are using, I recommend using IE conditional comments. From my logs almost a quarter of browsers that identify themselves as MSIE are actually something else, probably Mozilla or Opera, because they don't recognise the conditional comments like a real MSIE would.
Actually, I'd be very interested in how Microsoft decide to differentiate themselves in terms of a search product. Obviously, sinking this much money into a completely different search means they must have some sort of strategy for toppling Google off the throne, right ? That's what I want to see.
Microsoft's usual strategy; make <msfoo> the default <foo> in windows, and make it just good enough that most <foo> users won't go to the trouble of downloading <alterfoo>. When <alterfoo> goes out of business, stop maintaining <msfoo> apart from the most egrarious bugfixes.
It's been working for them since MSFT first started. Why would they change the strategy now?
In this case; get users used to searching from the toolbar, and make changing the default search in IE impractical for most users (it requires a registry hack or download). Most Windows users I know still have xtramsn.co.nz (local version of msn.com) or their ISP's default as their homepage; it's never occured to them to change it.
However Microsoft slightly misjudged how easy it is to bookmark a better search engine, and how much suckyness their own search engine could get away with. They'll make MSN search suck slightly less, reset everyone's search settings and homepage in the next 'update', and everything should be back on track again.
There's a big difference between "text to speech" and a screen reader. Blind users need to hear windows titles, error messages, menu text, etc. Try unplugging your monitor and see how far you can get with MS's inbuilt text to speech. It's hard enough even with a proper screen reader, completely impossible with "cut-and-paste" TTS.
BTW; I recommend downloading the trial version of JAWS and seeing how much you can do. It takes a lot of getting used to! Don't cheat, leave the monitor OFF.
"Not a typewriter" was supposed to be a joke.
/dev/tty*, the BELL character (0x07), etc all refer to the golfball or dot-matrix "teletype" machines that used to be the standard way of using a computer. Later these were replaced with CRT terminals such as the VT100, VT220, Wyse160, etc.
/.ers ever used a terminal, but I expect very few ever used a teletype.
More significantly, ENOTTY,
I'm not sure how many
Software insurance doesn't 'fix' the bugs, but you have the source code so it could cover paying a programmer who can fix it. It can also cover the cost of your business being closed three days while you restore all the backups, the cost of having to re-enter data after it got corrupted, legal fees you encounter when a bunch of people's payment details end up on a website somewhere.
OSS doesn't give you this, but neither does Microsoft.At least with OSS you have the option of paying for it.
What does Microsoft give you? They'll refund the price of the CD, and no more. If Microsoft decides that a bug isn't worth fixing, you are SOL. If you lose data, or get sued, or whatever, Microsoft _might_ refund the $300 or whatever per copy that you payed for the CD. Or they might decide that it's not their fault at all and you have to sue them to get even that. For everything else, you are SOL.
Don't believe me? Pull up the EULA for any Microsoft product, and scroll down to he last clause. It's completely unambiguous, all in capital letters, and it's usually also the only clause in the whole EULA that gets repeated in French and Spanish. Microsoft it quite clear on this, argue liability in court and you WILL lose.
Yeah, but it worked :) I didn't know about xfce4 before..
Also; the comment was made that the 'default redhat install' is what most new Linux users will be starting with. It needs to be no bigger or slower (by default!) than whatever Redmond is shipping at the time. I'd prefer it was significantly leaner.
Optional extras are fine, but slim down the default a little!
For disinfecting your desk (or hands) in a safe manner nothing really beats vodka or other high proof, food grade alcohol, but the moralists and politicians have made that an over pricey proposition.
"Oh don't give me none more of that Old Janx Spirit/ No, don't you give me none more of that Old Janx Spirit/ For my head will fly, my tongue will lie, my eyes will fry and I may die/ Won't you pour me one more of that sinful Old Janx Spirit"
TCP is NOT flawed. Sure you can spoof a packet or two, but (assuming reasonably strong sequence numbers) you can't fake a whole connection unless you are actually getting the reply packets.
mail is likewise not flawed; It is fairly hard to find an open relay these days; it is all-but-impossible to find one that doesn't put your IP address in the headers. That's your _REAL_ ip address. The one that ends up in RBL's so nobody accepts your mail any more.
The big flaw is home users; they keep getting pwn3d. And you can't even blame Microsoft for this any more. The viruses are arriving as a zipped, passworded attachment FFS. We've long since passed the realm of just clicking on an executable!
Here's how I see it; the antispam community were on the right track from the beginning. Blacklisting has made it impossible for spammers to spam from their OWN connections, even overseas, and pushed them to finding home users (to spam from, or to attack the blacklist sites). Now they're talking about changing the entire mail system, persuade thousands of users to change the way they do email? Hell no, we've almost won. We just need to educate enough END USERS not to get pwn3d, with the result that the DDoS attacks get cut down and the remaining much smaller number of spam sources can be more efficiently blacklisted.
Or we can force one more 'wafer thin' kludge onto the entire mail system, which the spammers will just find a way around next week anyhow.
.. That's what I used to think. Then I tried installing Redhat 9.
"somewhere inside Gnome, there's a small, fast and efficient GUI struggling to get out"
Since as long as I can remember.
Connection properties - TCP/IP properties - advanced - options - TCP/IP Filtering.
Windows 2000 and XP both have an inbuilt firewall, which is (pure genius!) off by default.
It's also bloody hard to configure. Most p2p apps recommend switching it off, because nobody can ever figure out how to open just one or two ports, but it does the job. Switching windows inbuilt firewall on BEFORE you dial up the internet will protect you well enough that you can go download a real firewall, virus scanner, and/or all the latest patches from MSFT.
Well firstly CP/M was a product of Digital Research, a different company than Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).
:)
IGIDNRC (I Guess I Did Not Recall Correctly)
I knew it was Digital something
With CP/M, it was possible for computers from two different manufacturers to run the same application without porting or recompiling.
CP/M was a product of DEC, IIRC, and ran on several of the early 8086 and Z80-based computers.
MSDOS would only run on in IBM-compatable PC, so portability of the applications under it is a fairly shallow point.
'fraid not. It's much more likely to crash in OUR back yard! (Like Skylab. It came down on a small island just off the west coast of New Zealand!)
One of the better resources for linux and open-source information is the WLUG wiki at http://wlug.org.nz
This is why the Fortune 500 company for whom I work has adopted a new Linux strategy:
We don't talk about Linux to the press.
Which means Microsoft wins. No more Ernie Ball-style Linux success stories in the press.
Interesting point;
Although it's not spyware (afaik) many of those 'copy protected' CD's do install software without warning, for the sole purpose of interfering with the normal operation of the computer.
How the hell is this _NOT_ illegal already?!!
And why is nobody being prosecuted for it? There's no shortage of hard evidence.
I have yet to find any spyware that wasn't easily removed