After protesting loudly and losing the argument, I ended up deploying ie6 across the network via wine. It took aproximately 3 days before they became infested.
Isn't cleaning them up just a case of killing all the wine-server processes then deleting and replacing the contents of the fake C: drive?
By equating the terms "operating system" and "user interface". What wisty was referring to was not "using the operating system" to chown and sudo, but rather "using a different user interface".
Re:Response from Kevin Finisterre, second bug
on
Month of Apple Fixes
·
· Score: 1
"it is interesting to note that vulnerabilities in cross platform applications may transfer more easily to the Intel-based Macs running Mac OS X..."
You appear to have completely missed the phrase "Both x86 and PowerPC versions are provided." in the reproduction steps section. The problem is that, like many people these days, you see an apparent coincidence (that both use the same architecture, even though it's a false observation) and assume causality. If you write code with a buffer overflow and compile it for x86, PPC, ARM, MIPS and your toaster, the code will still have a buffer overflow on all of them.
What I'm saying is that the architecture doesn't magically make a bug appear in a system just because it is similar to another system. The vulnerability didn't "transfer" to OS X, it simply exists in the OS X version, just like it does in the other versions. Note that only the Mac and Windows version are confirmed, but it could just as easily exist in others.
Re:Response from Kevin Finisterre, second bug
on
Month of Apple Fixes
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
WMVs played out of the box on your Mac? You didn't need Flip4Mac or anything else? How did you manage that, then?
You did catch the part where "Command-O" (which is a pretty good mnemonic for "Open this item") also works, right?
erm, yeah. You're still missing the point. The other replies to the parent of this thread prove my point; people expect enter to be the 'do whatever it is you do' button. Having two different _other_ shortcut keys to do that, and binding enter to rename, doesn't make sense to folk. Why not make it 3? how about command-R for "I command you to Run"?
The point is that it doesn't matter how many non-enter-key shortcuts there are, people are liable to select, and press enter. When enter doesn't do what they want, they'll be frustrated. If the user feels frustration just trying to launch an app, "fixing" it by pointing them to the myriad _other_ ways that they could have done it doesn't help.
But "Command-O" (I Command you to Open the file) seems at least as intuitive as F2 to, uh, Fix the 2ile name. And if you come from a UNIX background, what are you doing dinking around in the Finder? Terminal.app is your friend.
I never said F2 was a good keyboard shortcut. My point was that the enter key is an odd thing to bind to 'rename'. If you were in the terminal and typed a command, pressed enter, and realised that enter had been bound to 'edit the current command' instead of running it, would you think "Oh well, it doesn't matter, I'll just learn a new keyboard shortcut for this common function"? You'd probably just stop using that shell, and find one that isn't so stupid.
Similarly (going back to the UI), if you select something in a list with the up and down keys, or tab to a particular button, you'd expect to press enter to make it 'do' whatever it does. If enter isn't used as the 'make it so' button, then it'll most likely confuse folk. Having hung about on a variety of forums, the question "how to launch apps with keyboard?" comes up more than perhaps it should, and the response "press command-down or use the mouse" isn't generally received with "oh, that makes sense":)
And if you come from a UNIX background, what are you doing dinking around in the Finder? Terminal.app is your friend.
I also never said that I use the finder to do stuff. If I have a lot of renaming to do I tend to use a sh one-liner (or perl if it's something non-noddy).
I agree that it is very easy to rename files. Unfortunately, people coming from Windows or Linux or other non-Mac backgrounds will likely navigate with cursors, press enter, then get annoyed that the application didn't launch. option-down arrow is not an intuitive way to launch something with the keyboard, and renaming is not something that is done often enough that it deserves the prestige of being assigned the enter key; the most likely key to be hit if the user wants (what they consider to be) the default action - launching.
"if they do, that still doesn't change the fact that the place to learn "proper" English is English class."
The place to learn proper English is in an English class, but the place to make use of it is in all the other classes. You do realise that not everyone who takes an English class becomes an author, don't you?
FTFA: "Those who click on a link in a phishing e-mail that attempts to take them to a fake site and con them into entering their credit card number won't even make it to the website, if OpenDNS knows about it."
A false sense of security is worse than no security at all. "if OpenDNS knows about it" indeed... so when can the user trust that OpenDNS has successfully caught the phishing attempt, and when should they check that it has failed? The answer is simple; they should perform the same checks WITH OpenDNS as without, except now there will be a whole raft of users who don't know that and the phishing will get worse.
It's a metapa... no, just kidding, I know many people have already said that. However, if you look at the description of ubuntu-desktop (rather than just going "aah! stopit!" and reaching for a Windows CD) then it does tell you that it is not, in fact, the entire desktop.
I do recall a time once when Ximian Red Carpet (remember that, RPM fans?) decided to remove libc and everything that depended on it when I ugraded Galeon.
A person cannot be considered "computer literate" unless they can sit down in front of just about anything they might reasonably encounter and be able to get at least rudimentary stuff done. Learning just how to drill down a specific system's menus (or across "ribbons" if they ever appear) to the exclusion of alternate methods is almost worse than no education at all.
Hear hear!
I recently had to reinstall my in-law's PC due to it being crufted to the eyeballs and basically running like a dog. I took the opportunity to upgrade to WinXP and all was well. I then discovered that they didn't have an Office disk and my M-I-L uses Word a lot. Apparently a 'man just installed it for us'. Hmm.
Anyway, with no Office disk handy Installed OpenOffice.org2. The menus are largely similar, the font, size, alignment and formatting buttons are in the same place. The print button is in the the same place too. All is well.
The M-I-L comes along, clicks her Word document and starts editing. She has already mentally equated minor visual differences with the switch to WinXP, so ignores the slight layout shift and gets down to work. A little while later she notices some oddities. For example, OOo autocomplete was turned on, and it kept guessing what she was trying to type (correctly, I might add). Only then did she cotton on that it didn't say 'Microsoft Word' at the top of the window.
"I can't use this! I don't know how to work it! I only know Word!" came the cry. I try to counter with "You've just spent 2 productive hours getting a document together, including making the page 2-column and printing 2 sample copies. How can you say you don't know how to use it?"
Unfortunately ALL I got from there on in was "I only know Word! I only know Word! I don't know what this is, I only know Word!"
She now has Word 97 (legally). It's crap. She still has OOo if she wants it, but she still maintains she doesn't know how to use it. You seriously CANNOT help some people improve because they simply do not want to. There is a mental block that says "I don't know about computers" and that's as far as they will ever get.
Sadly this means that we long-suffering computer literate relatives have a lifetime of sorting out viruses, scams, trojans and spyware ahead of us because people, quite literally, will never learn.
Bang? Using a meaningless word means you spend more time explaining it. Everyone knows that ! is an exclamation-mark
Nonsense. Everybody knows that ! is 'pling' and ? is 'query'.
Also, it's not forward-slash, it's just slash. There was never a need to indicate direction until backslash was invented, and seeing as backslash indicates that it is the opposite of a slash... why the need for the excessive prefix?
I've done that. You wouldn't believe how little the operator comprehends your position (actually, you probably would believe it). The exchange goes like this:
Bank: Hi, I'm calling from RandomBank. Can you confirm that you are MrFishbot by providing your account number and sort code? Me: No. First you prove that you are from RandomBank Bank:... Bank: um... but... who else would I be? Me: Goodbye
Some of these URLs+site combinations had *very* well-crafted URLs using tricks like this that would almost certainly fool most users who had been told "don't click on a link unless it says it's going to 'ebay.com' in the status bar."
That's why this is flawed advice, and it's why I don't give it. Instead, I tell people that they should NEVER click the link, even if it looks genuine. Instead, they should open their browser, type in the address or click their bookmark, and log in to their account.
This will prove most scams immediately (e.g. if you can log in, then your account has obviously NOT been suspended...), and the ones it doesn't will be easy to verify. If there is no warning that matches the email and you are still not convinced, phone them up or use the online support tools directly.
Basically, the rule is the same as for unsolicited phone calls: always be the one to initiate the communication. If you phone your bank using the number on your statement, then you've got through to the right place. If you type the URL on your statement into the address bar, you've got to the right place. If you let somebody else initiate the communication, either by phoning you, sending email, fax, or whatever, and you trust them not to lie, then you're as good as caught already.
So here, my super-duper FreeBSD desktop that had me playing America's Army, frustrated me enough to try another distro that could at least give me back the web-browsing-bare-minimums that supported Flash. Its a real shame that these little pieces cant get sorted out or I would likely have stuck with FreeBSD on the desktop.
And therein lies the problem of closed source formats. FreeBSD COULDN'T give you Flash (unless you used a development version of Gnash) because Macromedia said no. If Macromedia have such a stranglehold over your desktop OS choice, then you have no choice but to use a platform that they dictate to you.
Of course, the only thing I use Flash for these days is Google Videos and Weebl 'n' Bob...
Maybe they do want ponies. That's fine. It is no good saying, effectively, that the reason MS docs don't always translate well to OO and vice versa is that users get it wrong. This article is just falling back on the old BS about how the program is perfect. That it produces poor results if, of course, all the dumb user's fault. We need to move on from this and put the focus on programming that serves the user.
OK, so lets look at this from the point of view of a developer trying to build a system that serves the user's needs. The users treat the wordprocessor as a typewriter with fonts, but they want it to magically update properly when they move stuff around and change options. So... what could we give them?
Well, for a start we could give them controls that let them specify how far into the page the paragraph is without resorting to tabs that can get messed up. Let's call that the "indentation". Also, we could let the user tell the software "this is my heading" and it should know how what font to use. We could call them "styles". Hey, and how about if people want a gap under the paragraphs without having to remember to press enter every time? We could have a setting that tells it how big the gap could be!
Of course, this has all been done already. The problem is that the constant bleating of "the software should do what the user wants" is the basic assumption that the software can figure out what the hell the user wants, without even being told! Easy to use software does not mean 'software that needs no manual'. Creating a document that can be properly updated without the leg work of manually reformatting every bit of it, even within the same word processor, requires a slight shift in thinking from 'purely presentation' to 'structure and style'.
The exact same shift in thinking is what causes some HTML pages to resemble a mass of <br> tags and non-breaking spaces, and some to resemble just a handful of <p> tags and let the CSS do the rest. If you are determined that you are going to use <br> and regardless of what is available to you, on the grounds that you don't already know how to do it and shouldn't have to learn, then you deserve everything you get.
In short, yes. I use it to allow my Palm Tungsten to dial up using O2's GPRS service without the line-of-site hassle of IrDA. It also allows me to send and receive SMS and dial numbers directly from my Palm address book. By simply buying a Palm with bluetooth to replace my aging M500 (sans bluetooth) it's opened up a whole world of useful functionality.
It's interesting that every time a post hits the front page with 'Christian Science' in it, a post almost exactly resembling the parent appears in short order.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't cleaning them up just a case of killing all the wine-server processes then deleting and replacing the contents of the fake C: drive?
By equating the terms "operating system" and "user interface". What wisty was referring to was not "using the operating system" to chown and sudo, but rather "using a different user interface".
"it is interesting to note that vulnerabilities in cross platform applications may transfer more easily to the Intel-based Macs running Mac OS X..."
You appear to have completely missed the phrase "Both x86 and PowerPC versions are provided." in the reproduction steps section. The problem is that, like many people these days, you see an apparent coincidence (that both use the same architecture, even though it's a false observation) and assume causality. If you write code with a buffer overflow and compile it for x86, PPC, ARM, MIPS and your toaster, the code will still have a buffer overflow on all of them.
What I'm saying is that the architecture doesn't magically make a bug appear in a system just because it is similar to another system. The vulnerability didn't "transfer" to OS X, it simply exists in the OS X version, just like it does in the other versions. Note that only the Mac and Windows version are confirmed, but it could just as easily exist in others.
WMVs played out of the box on your Mac? You didn't need Flip4Mac or anything else? How did you manage that, then?
You did catch the part where "Command-O" (which is a pretty good mnemonic for "Open this item") also works, right?
erm, yeah. You're still missing the point. The other replies to the parent of this thread prove my point; people expect enter to be the 'do whatever it is you do' button. Having two different _other_ shortcut keys
to do that, and binding enter to rename, doesn't make sense to folk. Why not make it 3? how about command-R for "I command you to Run"?
The point is that it doesn't matter how many non-enter-key shortcuts there are, people are liable to select, and press enter. When enter doesn't do what they want, they'll be frustrated. If the user feels frustration just trying to launch an app, "fixing" it by pointing them to the myriad _other_ ways that they could have done it doesn't help.
But "Command-O" (I Command you to Open the file) seems at least as intuitive as F2 to, uh, Fix the 2ile name. And if you come from a UNIX background, what are you doing dinking around in the Finder? Terminal.app is your friend.
:)
I never said F2 was a good keyboard shortcut. My point was that the enter key is an odd thing to bind to 'rename'. If you were in the terminal and typed a command, pressed enter, and realised that enter had been bound to 'edit the current command' instead of running it, would you think "Oh well, it doesn't matter, I'll just learn a new keyboard shortcut for this common function"? You'd probably just stop using that shell, and find one that isn't so stupid.
Similarly (going back to the UI), if you select something in a list with the up and down keys, or tab to a particular button, you'd expect to press enter to make it 'do' whatever it does. If enter isn't used as the 'make it so' button, then it'll most likely confuse folk. Having hung about on a variety of forums, the question "how to launch apps with keyboard?" comes up more than perhaps it should, and the response "press command-down or use the mouse" isn't generally received with "oh, that makes sense"
And if you come from a UNIX background, what are you doing dinking around in the Finder? Terminal.app is your friend.
I also never said that I use the finder to do stuff. If I have a lot of renaming to do I tend to use a sh one-liner (or perl if it's something non-noddy).
I agree that it is very easy to rename files. Unfortunately, people coming from Windows or Linux or other non-Mac backgrounds will likely navigate with cursors, press enter, then get annoyed that the application didn't launch. option-down arrow is not an intuitive way to launch something with the keyboard, and renaming is not something that is done often enough that it deserves the prestige of being assigned the enter key; the most likely key to be hit if the user wants (what they consider to be) the default action - launching.
"if they do, that still doesn't change the fact that the place to learn "proper" English is English class."
The place to learn proper English is in an English class, but the place to make use of it is in all the other classes. You do realise that not everyone who takes an English class becomes an author, don't you?
Choice quote from the article:
"I think the secret to the future is quantity," Lucas said
In other words, he's not going to make more movies, he's just going to make loads and loads and loads of terrible TV spin-off series.
Oh my.
FTFA: "Those who click on a link in a phishing e-mail that attempts to take them to a fake site and con them into entering their credit card number won't even make it to the website, if OpenDNS knows about it."
... so when can the user trust that OpenDNS has successfully caught the phishing attempt, and when should they check that it has failed? The answer is simple; they should perform the same checks WITH OpenDNS as without, except now there will be a whole raft of users who don't know that and the phishing will get worse.
...
A false sense of security is worse than no security at all. "if OpenDNS knows about it" indeed
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions
Blimey. Well, it wasn't updated when I checked before lunch ... ;-)
Automatix doesn't support Dapper just yet ...
It's a metapa... no, just kidding, I know many people have already said that. However, if you look at the description of ubuntu-desktop (rather than just going "aah! stopit!" and reaching for a Windows CD) then it does tell you that it is not, in fact, the entire desktop.
I do recall a time once when Ximian Red Carpet (remember that, RPM fans?) decided to remove libc and everything that depended on it when I ugraded Galeon.
That wasn't fun.
You forgot the smiley there. I hope you forgot the smiley there, I should say.
:-)
Yes, I forgot the smiley, although this is how they were referred to back when Acorn was king
A person cannot be considered "computer literate" unless they can sit down in front of just about anything they might reasonably encounter and be able to get at least rudimentary stuff done. Learning just how to drill down a specific system's menus (or across "ribbons" if they ever appear) to the exclusion of alternate methods is almost worse than no education at all.
Hear hear!
I recently had to reinstall my in-law's PC due to it being crufted to the eyeballs and basically running like a dog. I took the opportunity to upgrade to WinXP and all was well. I then discovered that they didn't have an Office disk and my M-I-L uses Word a lot. Apparently a 'man just installed it for us'. Hmm.
Anyway, with no Office disk handy Installed OpenOffice.org2. The menus are largely similar, the font, size, alignment and formatting buttons are in the same place. The print button is in the the same place too. All is well.
The M-I-L comes along, clicks her Word document and starts editing. She has already mentally equated minor visual differences with the switch to WinXP, so ignores the slight layout shift and gets down to work. A little while later she notices some oddities. For example, OOo autocomplete was turned on, and it kept guessing what she was trying to type (correctly, I might add). Only then did she cotton on that it didn't say 'Microsoft Word' at the top of the window.
"I can't use this! I don't know how to work it! I only know Word!" came the cry. I try to counter with "You've just spent 2 productive hours getting a document together, including making the page 2-column and printing 2 sample copies. How can you say you don't know how to use it?"
Unfortunately ALL I got from there on in was "I only know Word! I only know Word! I don't know what this is, I only know Word!"
She now has Word 97 (legally). It's crap. She still has OOo if she wants it, but she still maintains she doesn't know how to use it. You seriously CANNOT help some people improve because they simply do not want to. There is a mental block that says "I don't know about computers" and that's as far as they will ever get.
Sadly this means that we long-suffering computer literate relatives have a lifetime of sorting out viruses, scams, trojans and spyware ahead of us because people, quite literally, will never learn.
Bang? Using a meaningless word means you spend more time explaining it. Everyone knows that ! is an exclamation-mark
... why the need for the excessive prefix?
... I might adopt that one.
Nonsense. Everybody knows that ! is 'pling' and ? is 'query'.
Also, it's not forward-slash, it's just slash. There was never a need to indicate direction until backslash was invented, and seeing as backslash indicates that it is the opposite of a slash
I do like slosh though
I've done that. You wouldn't believe how little the operator comprehends your position (actually, you probably would believe it). The exchange goes like this:
... ... but ... who else would I be?
Bank: Hi, I'm calling from RandomBank. Can you confirm that you are MrFishbot by providing your account number and sort code?
Me: No. First you prove that you are from RandomBank
Bank:
Bank: um
Me: Goodbye
Some of these URLs+site combinations had *very* well-crafted URLs using tricks like this that would almost certainly fool most users who had been told "don't click on a link unless it says it's going to 'ebay.com' in the status bar."
...), and the ones it doesn't will be easy to verify. If there is no warning that matches the email and you are still not convinced, phone them up or use the online support tools directly.
That's why this is flawed advice, and it's why I don't give it. Instead, I tell people that they should NEVER click the link, even if it looks genuine. Instead, they should open their browser, type in the address or click their bookmark, and log in to their account.
This will prove most scams immediately (e.g. if you can log in, then your account has obviously NOT been suspended
Basically, the rule is the same as for unsolicited phone calls: always be the one to initiate the communication. If you phone your bank using the number on your statement, then you've got through to the right place. If you type the URL on your statement into the address bar, you've got to the right place. If you let somebody else initiate the communication, either by phoning you, sending email, fax, or whatever, and you trust them not to lie, then you're as good as caught already.
So here, my super-duper FreeBSD desktop that had me playing America's Army, frustrated me enough to try another distro that could at least give me back the web-browsing-bare-minimums that supported Flash. Its a real shame that these little pieces cant get sorted out or I would likely have stuck with FreeBSD on the desktop.
...
And therein lies the problem of closed source formats. FreeBSD COULDN'T give you Flash (unless you used a development version of Gnash) because Macromedia said no. If Macromedia have such a stranglehold over your desktop OS choice, then you have no choice but to use a platform that they dictate to you.
Of course, the only thing I use Flash for these days is Google Videos and Weebl 'n' Bob
Maybe they do want ponies. That's fine. It is no good saying, effectively, that the reason MS docs don't always translate well to OO and vice versa is that users get it wrong. This article is just falling back on the old BS about how the program is perfect. That it produces poor results if, of course, all the dumb user's fault. We need to move on from this and put the focus on programming that serves the user.
... what could we give them?
OK, so lets look at this from the point of view of a developer trying to build a system that serves the user's needs. The users treat the wordprocessor as a typewriter with fonts, but they want it to magically update properly when they move stuff around and change options. So
Well, for a start we could give them controls that let them specify how far into the page the paragraph is without resorting to tabs that can get messed up. Let's call that the "indentation". Also, we could let the user tell the software "this is my heading" and it should know how what font to use. We could call them "styles". Hey, and how about if people want a gap under the paragraphs without having to remember to press enter every time? We could have a setting that tells it how big the gap could be!
Of course, this has all been done already. The problem is that the constant bleating of "the software should do what the user wants" is the basic assumption that the software can figure out what the hell the user wants, without even being told! Easy to use software does not mean 'software that needs no manual'. Creating a document that can be properly updated without the leg work of manually reformatting every bit of it, even within the same word processor, requires a slight shift in thinking from 'purely presentation' to 'structure and style'.
The exact same shift in thinking is what causes some HTML pages to resemble a mass of <br> tags and non-breaking spaces, and some to resemble just a handful of <p> tags and let the CSS do the rest. If you are determined that you are going to use <br> and regardless of what is available to you, on the grounds that you don't already know how to do it and shouldn't have to learn, then you deserve everything you get.
Hmm,
Yes,
I see.
Perhaps if
I wasn't slightly
Drunk I would make better sense, eh?
Oops!
D'Oh!
My bad,
Damn my eyes!
Checked the longer lines,
Forgot the simplest of errors.
Easy?
No,
Not true.
It is simple.
Don't blindly split prose,
produce a poetic stanza!
In short, yes. I use it to allow my Palm Tungsten to dial up using O2's GPRS service without the line-of-site hassle of IrDA. It also allows me to send and receive SMS and dial numbers directly from my Palm address book. By simply buying a Palm with bluetooth to replace my aging M500 (sans bluetooth) it's opened up a whole world of useful functionality.
It's interesting that every time a post hits the front page with 'Christian Science' in it, a post almost exactly resembling the parent appears in short order.