They tried this with their big security CD thing. Unfortunately you had to sign up on the website, and they mail it to you, etc.
I agree, they should be sending out these security CDs (and ones with SP2 when it comes out) a la AOL. I should be able to get them at the post office, shopping mall, and any electronics store anywhere. That sort of exposure is what MS needs to get the word out that they are serious about security and they are trying to fix it.
It's not like they don't have the $ to afford the $0.02 per cd...
Of course, as others have mentioned, they've already won the desktop wars so there is less reason for them to do as much of a job to fix things.
IIRC MS disallows any PC to be shipped that boots into anything but windows. If an OEM violates this suddenly their copies of windows jump from the nice cheap cost they are at now to a much higher price. Therefor, OEMs don't do this. Oh, and the OEM agreements are all NDA'd up the hoop, so you can't actually look at them.
Check out the fight that the BeOS guys had, offering to allow OEMs to put in BeOS as a dual boot option for free (beos wasn't free remember) and they still wouldn't do it.
Also, note that the "extra" packages that are installed on PCs are generally not competing with anything MS provides. You won't see an office suite or a development studio on there, but you will see all sorts of crap (based on the last time I bought an off the shelf compaq PC)... AOL, broadband, dialup, etc sort of software. Not useful stuff like an IRC client or an office suite (unless it's MS Works or another MS suite of course:)
Not exactly a security tool per-se, but some friends mentioned a screensaver that ran on linux and used etherreal or something similar to look for image files flowing by on the network, capture them and display them as a screensaver. A nice tool for a sysadmin to see what their users are looking at.
I mean no disrespect, but I'm going to guess you've never been a software developer. If you were you'd know that every piece of software has bugs and issues, regardless of the language you use to describe them. In a perfect world internet time would stop while you developed your programs and you'd be able to work for as long as was needed to fix all the bugs, issues, and defects and produce a "perfect" program on time and on budget.
In the real world this doesn't happen. Deadlines slip, and if they slip to far management and / or devs have to decide what are the most important things to fix. Sometimes this means that documentation is left incomplete or with spelling errors, sometimes it means that if you click foo, bar, baz, while spinning on your right heal and alt-ctrl-hyper-meta-shift-clicking on the about box the program will crash or throw an error, and sometimes it means that spellcheck will be disabled until version 1.1 of the product. That's how development is, or a least in my experience.
If its any concellation (and I know it won't be) it doesn't seem to recognize the email address that it used to use before... in fact, any email I might have used with it it just comes back 'unknown email address'.
Of course, it's also not sending registration emails to the newly registered account I created, so I'm guessing they're slashdotted in the backend if ya knowwhatimean.
Re:Lighting! Yes! Let your employees choose!
on
Building a Better Office
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
+1!
We just moved offices into something a bit nicer, and since it's only the three from the dev team in here we can have the lights off and the only light either sneaks in from the door that connects us to the rest of the building, or the nice big window that lets some of that "natural light" stuff in.
Of course, if you have a dark office you have to deal with the crap of people constantly wandering into the office with witty comments like...
"wow, dark in here" "you guys like the dark or something" "this must be where the mushrooms live" "wow, it's dark in here" et infinitum
I really want a 1,000,000 candle spotlight to point at the door in cases like this. It's fine for the first few times, but after the 50th person who wanders in with a "dark in here isn't it" comment, you really want to kill someone.
I filed a bug for this *ages* ago (relating to being able to integrate bogofilter as well IIRC) and it was shot down immediately with a "this is stupid, we'd never do this" comment.
Well, technically they can get such low access to windows through a separate program by just installing a kernel mode driver that could interprete what program is trying to execute what file. In theory anyway.
I just did a digicam presentation for my LUG and included info on dcraw. There is also VueScan which allows more complex RAW manipulation, though the UI is a bit wacky. Cross platform non-free software, but it works well, and deals with scanners, files, etc.
If he's your cup of tea, I just hit alt.binaries.howard-stern and download the show so you can listen at your lesiure. I listen every day on the west coast starting around 8:30 or so and depending on interruptions I can get through the 3 hour + show by around 2 or 3.
I used to think that Stern was nothing but dick and fart jokes, but I never really listened or paid attention. It took me a couple of days to get into it, and a couple of weeks to get to know the various characters and format of the show. The stern show is nicely non-extreme left or right wing, which gives you someone who seems to be able to think for himself (he was pro-bush until recently, and now he's very anti-bush). He seems to appeal to people who aren't afraid to think or say what is on their mind, be it politics, or sex. If you don't like it's that's fine, but I recommend that you give it a shot.
>I like the fact that there isn't a central monolithic registry that can take the entire system down.
Unlike when your RPM database gets corrupted or when RedHat inadvertantly puts the wrong information on glibc and everyone upgrades and is left with a machine that you can only reinstall the OS on (the shortest path)
Try an experiment. Delete your windows registry file(s) (assuming you can find them) and continue using your machine as normal, or reboot and do what you normally do. Does your machine require a re-install to make things run again?
Now delete your rpm/dpkg/emerge database. rm -rf/var/lib/dpkg, or whatever the equivelant is for redhat and friends. Continue running your apps, or reboot and run your apps normally. Does your machine require a re-install?
I'd say your answers would be yes for windows, no for linux. Why? Because the rpm/dpkg database is not used for much beyond package management. If you were to accidently nuke your/var/dpkg directory you could quite easily continue running the machine while that dir was either restored, re-created, or a second machine is built. I somehow doubt that windows is as forgiving, because the registry really acts like your $HOME/.files. Maybe a better comparision is to wonder if you deleted all the dotfiles in your home dir would you have to re-install just to run normally. Again I'd have to say 'no'.
>I prefer Mozilla to IE. Always have.
Objectively? or subjectively?
For this I'd have to say security, standards support, usability, and features all contribute to making mozilla mail/browser better than IE/outlook. A fair question though.
>It's nice that Linux will run (granted with a little work) on my prehistoric 486dx2.
Why? I guess it's nice to be nostalgic but I replaced all of those machines with machines that are a bit faster. As far as creep, Linux suffers it as much as Windows, just a couple years behind. One time, back in the day, Linux could be installed on my Pentium 60 with as little as 8M of RAM. Today, minimum recommended is 128M with 256M being "better" (see SuSE web pages, since I was just there earlier today actually *buying* a 9.1 distribution from them, for this example).
Why buy a new machine if you don't need one? I think the 486 is a bit old, but I ran my website on a p2 with 128megs of ram for a couple of years and it ran just fine, including the latest linux distro. Think that w2k/w2k3/iis/exchange/sql server would have run on that machine? Doubtful. Course, that brings in that I couldn't afford to run the MS equivelant apps that I was running on that host (web/mail/database).
>It's nice that there's so much useful documentation on Linux out there. No matter what problem I'm having, the Linux community has documented just about everything incredibly well. And they never ask how helpful they were when they were no help at all. That's nice too.
Heh, yeah... those wonderful 'man' pages. When there is documentation, it is completely dry when having simply one example of a very common use would answer 90% of all questions about it. Linux documentation (and even Unix documentation for the most part) is seriously lacking. It's written by engineers for engineers. No examples, just lists of the 200+ command line options for every program with almost no direction of which ones are useful together.
Man pages suck donkey balls, but most linux support sites (ie: forums.gentoo.org, etc) are pretty decent. A heck of a lot easier to find things than searching on MSDN that's for sure. Of course, if you're going to compare man pages to windows, you'd better factor in XPs wonderful built in help browser ("is the cdrom working now? click yes if it is..."). Sure it's blue and pretty, but I find it's answers as useless as man pages most of the time, and at least with man pages they give me a lot of information that I can sift through, instead of NO information at all.
That all said I disagree wtih some of the things that the original poster had as well, a bit too much of the Linux party line, but not all of the party lines are wrong, if you know what I mean.
Well, the redirecting works the same, but the windows cmd shell (ok, DOS 5 is pretty much the same as the xp cmd shell) doesn't compare at all to any Unix like shell (bash, tsch, cygwin, etc).
I haven't had any problems with collisions, but honestly most of my images are still in the default IMGPXXXX.[raw|jpg] format, I only started renaming recently:) It also means that renaming is a bit harder, as instead of just hitting f2 or clicking (depending on the program you use) and typing a new name, you have to hit f2 arrow, backspace, and then type:(
I use Apache::Gallery on my site as just a raw and uncut access to my photos and have wanted to modify it to deal with jpeg comments to use for the description of the image, but a) haven't gotten around to it and b) haven't had time to find out if any programs that do image manipulation/organization write comments to the jpeg comments field, instead of their own database. It'd certainly be nice to have all the information in an image self contained though.
I'm sure you're joking and trying to be funny, but unless you know a lot about photography and camera technology, reading the manual and learning what each of the functions the camera does will help move you beyond snapshots and into pictures that can be great.
For example, do you know the difference between spot, center weighted, and evaluative metering? Do you know which situations demand one or the other? Maybe you do, but maybe you don't, but if you read the manual chances are you'll have a better idea than if you just put everything on "green" and snap away.
I used to do this as well, but went to this:/yyyy-mm-dd some description/image description.jpg
I found that after I'd aquired a few thousand images it became pretty hard to find that picture of the leg of my couch with just looking through directories. At least with looking at a list with files like:/2004-05-05 cats, flowers, around work/flower 2.jpg it's a bit easier to find. I'd love to use a tool like photoshop album (doesn't support the naming conventions I like), jasc paint shop album (no RAW support) or others (some too simple, some overly complex), but I just haven't found one that fits with everything I'm looking for.
You're absolutely right. In fact, I'm offended that the people from OSDN are refusing to put up ads for date-rape drugs and the fine establishments offering ads for baby killing and the beating of old ladies. How dare they not accept money from someone claiming something about "principles" or "ethics". Don't they know that money is all that's important?
Slashdot Mirror
They tried this with their big security CD thing. Unfortunately you had to sign up on the website, and they mail it to you, etc.
I agree, they should be sending out these security CDs (and ones with SP2 when it comes out) a la AOL. I should be able to get them at the post office, shopping mall, and any electronics store anywhere. That sort of exposure is what MS needs to get the word out that they are serious about security and they are trying to fix it.
It's not like they don't have the $ to afford the $0.02 per cd...
Of course, as others have mentioned, they've already won the desktop wars so there is less reason for them to do as much of a job to fix things.
IIRC MS disallows any PC to be shipped that boots into anything but windows. If an OEM violates this suddenly their copies of windows jump from the nice cheap cost they are at now to a much higher price. Therefor, OEMs don't do this. Oh, and the OEM agreements are all NDA'd up the hoop, so you can't actually look at them.
:)
Check out the fight that the BeOS guys had, offering to allow OEMs to put in BeOS as a dual boot option for free (beos wasn't free remember) and they still wouldn't do it.
Also, note that the "extra" packages that are installed on PCs are generally not competing with anything MS provides. You won't see an office suite or a development studio on there, but you will see all sorts of crap (based on the last time I bought an off the shelf compaq PC)... AOL, broadband, dialup, etc sort of software. Not useful stuff like an IRC client or an office suite (unless it's MS Works or another MS suite of course
Also, if you see the bug in sendmail you can (in theory) find the bug and recompile, or download a patch from someone else who has done the same.
With IE you have no option but to depend on Microsoft for patches and updates.
5-digits? Bah, youngster!
Back in my day....
Awsome, many thanks!
Not exactly a security tool per-se, but some friends mentioned a screensaver that ran on linux and used etherreal or something similar to look for image files flowing by on the network, capture them and display them as a screensaver. A nice tool for a sysadmin to see what their users are looking at.
Anyone know the name/URL of such a beast?
Thanks!
I mean no disrespect, but I'm going to guess you've never been a software developer. If you were you'd know that every piece of software has bugs and issues, regardless of the language you use to describe them. In a perfect world internet time would stop while you developed your programs and you'd be able to work for as long as was needed to fix all the bugs, issues, and defects and produce a "perfect" program on time and on budget.
In the real world this doesn't happen. Deadlines slip, and if they slip to far management and / or devs have to decide what are the most important things to fix. Sometimes this means that documentation is left incomplete or with spelling errors, sometimes it means that if you click foo, bar, baz, while spinning on your right heal and alt-ctrl-hyper-meta-shift-clicking on the about box the program will crash or throw an error, and sometimes it means that spellcheck will be disabled until version 1.1 of the product. That's how development is, or a least in my experience.
If its any concellation (and I know it won't be) it doesn't seem to recognize the email address that it used to use before... in fact, any email I might have used with it it just comes back 'unknown email address'.
Of course, it's also not sending registration emails to the newly registered account I created, so I'm guessing they're slashdotted in the backend if ya knowwhatimean.
+1!
We just moved offices into something a bit nicer, and since it's only the three from the dev team in here we can have the lights off and the only light either sneaks in from the door that connects us to the rest of the building, or the nice big window that lets some of that "natural light" stuff in.
Of course, if you have a dark office you have to deal with the crap of people constantly wandering into the office with witty comments like...
"wow, dark in here"
"you guys like the dark or something"
"this must be where the mushrooms live"
"wow, it's dark in here"
et infinitum
I really want a 1,000,000 candle spotlight to point at the door in cases like this. It's fine for the first few times, but after the 50th person who wanders in with a "dark in here isn't it" comment, you really want to kill someone.
I'd swear by openoffice but I'm still waiting for it to finish compiling. /gentoo
I filed a bug for this *ages* ago (relating to being able to integrate bogofilter as well IIRC) and it was shot down immediately with a "this is stupid, we'd never do this" comment.
Well, technically they can get such low access to windows through a separate program by just installing a kernel mode driver that could interprete what program is trying to execute what file. In theory anyway.
I just did a digicam presentation for my LUG and included info on dcraw. There is also VueScan which allows more complex RAW manipulation, though the UI is a bit wacky. Cross platform non-free software, but it works well, and deals with scanners, files, etc.
That's why the Rio Karma 20G mp3 player supports OGG and FLAC as well as mp3 and wma right?
If he's your cup of tea, I just hit alt.binaries.howard-stern and download the show so you can listen at your lesiure. I listen every day on the west coast starting around 8:30 or so and depending on interruptions I can get through the 3 hour + show by around 2 or 3.
I used to think that Stern was nothing but dick and fart jokes, but I never really listened or paid attention. It took me a couple of days to get into it, and a couple of weeks to get to know the various characters and format of the show. The stern show is nicely non-extreme left or right wing, which gives you someone who seems to be able to think for himself (he was pro-bush until recently, and now he's very anti-bush). He seems to appeal to people who aren't afraid to think or say what is on their mind, be it politics, or sex. If you don't like it's that's fine, but I recommend that you give it a shot.
Only 10,000 here :( I shall have to redouble my efforts!
>I like the fact that there isn't a central monolithic registry that can take the entire system down.
Unlike when your RPM database gets corrupted or when RedHat inadvertantly puts the wrong information on glibc and everyone upgrades and is left with a machine that you can only reinstall the OS on (the shortest path)
Try an experiment. Delete your windows registry file(s) (assuming you can find them) and continue using your machine as normal, or reboot and do what you normally do. Does your machine require a re-install to make things run again?
Now delete your rpm/dpkg/emerge database. rm -rf
I'd say your answers would be yes for windows, no for linux. Why? Because the rpm/dpkg database is not used for much beyond package management. If you were to accidently nuke your
>I prefer Mozilla to IE. Always have.
Objectively? or subjectively?
For this I'd have to say security, standards support, usability, and features all contribute to making mozilla mail/browser better than IE/outlook. A fair question though.
>It's nice that Linux will run (granted with a little work) on my prehistoric 486dx2.
Why? I guess it's nice to be nostalgic but I replaced all of those machines with machines that are a bit faster. As far as creep, Linux suffers it as much as Windows, just a couple years behind. One time, back in the day, Linux could be installed on my Pentium 60 with as little as 8M of RAM. Today, minimum recommended is 128M with 256M being "better" (see SuSE web pages, since I was just there earlier today actually *buying* a 9.1 distribution from them, for this example).
Why buy a new machine if you don't need one? I think the 486 is a bit old, but I ran my website on a p2 with 128megs of ram for a couple of years and it ran just fine, including the latest linux distro. Think that w2k/w2k3/iis/exchange/sql server would have run on that machine? Doubtful. Course, that brings in that I couldn't afford to run the MS equivelant apps that I was running on that host (web/mail/database).
>It's nice that there's so much useful documentation on Linux out there. No matter what problem I'm having, the Linux community has documented just about everything incredibly well. And they never ask how helpful they were when they were no help at all. That's nice too.
Heh, yeah... those wonderful 'man' pages. When there is documentation, it is completely dry when having simply one example of a very common use would answer 90% of all questions about it. Linux documentation (and even Unix documentation for the most part) is seriously lacking. It's written by engineers for engineers. No examples, just lists of the 200+ command line options for every program with almost no direction of which ones are useful together.
Man pages suck donkey balls, but most linux support sites (ie: forums.gentoo.org, etc) are pretty decent. A heck of a lot easier to find things than searching on MSDN that's for sure. Of course, if you're going to compare man pages to windows, you'd better factor in XPs wonderful built in help browser ("is the cdrom working now? click yes if it is..."). Sure it's blue and pretty, but I find it's answers as useless as man pages most of the time, and at least with man pages they give me a lot of information that I can sift through, instead of NO information at all.
That all said I disagree wtih some of the things that the original poster had as well, a bit too much of the Linux party line, but not all of the party lines are wrong, if you know what I mean.
Well, the redirecting works the same, but the windows cmd shell (ok, DOS 5 is pretty much the same as the xp cmd shell) doesn't compare at all to any Unix like shell (bash, tsch, cygwin, etc).
and that's only sometimes cause they hit the ISO newsgroups pretty hard too.
I knew I forgot to do something today. Thanks for the reminder!
Hey dude!
:) It also means that renaming is a bit harder, as instead of just hitting f2 or clicking (depending on the program you use) and typing a new name, you have to hit f2 arrow, backspace, and then type :(
I haven't had any problems with collisions, but honestly most of my images are still in the default IMGPXXXX.[raw|jpg] format, I only started renaming recently
I use Apache::Gallery on my site as just a raw and uncut access to my photos and have wanted to modify it to deal with jpeg comments to use for the description of the image, but a) haven't gotten around to it and b) haven't had time to find out if any programs that do image manipulation/organization write comments to the jpeg comments field, instead of their own database. It'd certainly be nice to have all the information in an image self contained though.
Why not make laptops that don't *require* extra equipment to prevent you from burning your family jewels off? What a concept!
I'm sure you're joking and trying to be funny, but unless you know a lot about photography and camera technology, reading the manual and learning what each of the functions the camera does will help move you beyond snapshots and into pictures that can be great.
For example, do you know the difference between spot, center weighted, and evaluative metering? Do you know which situations demand one or the other? Maybe you do, but maybe you don't, but if you read the manual chances are you'll have a better idea than if you just put everything on "green" and snap away.
I used to do this as well, but went to this: /yyyy-mm-dd some description/image description.jpg
/2004-05-05 cats, flowers, around work/flower 2.jpg
I found that after I'd aquired a few thousand images it became pretty hard to find that picture of the leg of my couch with just looking through directories. At least with looking at a list with files like:
it's a bit easier to find. I'd love to use a tool like photoshop album (doesn't support the naming conventions I like), jasc paint shop album (no RAW support) or others (some too simple, some overly complex), but I just haven't found one that fits with everything I'm looking for.
You're absolutely right. In fact, I'm offended that the people from OSDN are refusing to put up ads for date-rape drugs and the fine establishments offering ads for baby killing and the beating of old ladies. How dare they not accept money from someone claiming something about "principles" or "ethics". Don't they know that money is all that's important?